Azure gives users the capability to write functions using simple building blocks which can wire up business functionality easily. The name of this offering is Logic Apps. Below I’m going to demonstrate this using my twitter account and linkedIn.
My use case is simple, when I publish a post on this site, I have a WordPress plugin, WP Twitter Auto Publish, which auto tweets that a new post has been released. I wanted the same for LinkedIn, but the linkedIn plugins weren’t reliable.
I know that Azure Logic Apps uses simple workflows which can authenticate against the two sites and then do simple actions.
Do a search for Logic Apps in the Azure Portal top search box. Click on the service
Then click Add to Add a new one. Fill in the region, resource group requirements as you would any other Azure resource. Let Azure do its thing…
You get put into the Logic Apps Designer web interface.
So as you can see there are some basic triggers, so you can use a http endpoint to fire the trigger, or use outlook events or whatever. We want to use the twitter, when a new tweet is posted.
The logic app will ask you to sign in to Twitter to connect up Logic Apps with Twitter. Once connected you see the following:
As you can see, we can specify the text we’re looking for in a tweet and I’ve specifically said only check tweets from @techfrontieruk (if you don’t then it’ll process input on every tweet going forward with the hashtag of devops in it). I’ve also bumped the interval to check too, it doesn’t need to check every three minutes, so we can save some money by having it run less frequently.
When you’re happy with that bit click the Add icon at the bottom to add another step.
You can do a search for various connectors, so I’ve put linkedIn in, it’ll need to authenticate again and then we’ll see some options on what to do with the data that comes from the tweet.
When you click on the content URL, a dialog box opens to the right and you can point and click to the data you want to post in linkedIn! and then we’re done.
We can test it by clicking the run icon at the top, and then write a test tweet with #devops in it.
(Some people in my network probably saw a flurry of posts in linkedIn as I was testing). Sorry for that š