RB: Follow Another User

Full, runnable src of Follow Another User can be downloaded as part of the RB tutorials repository.

This tutorial will take you through the process of following/muting/unfollowing/ummuting an author and checking the follow status of an author.

Sections

1. Follow
2. Check Follow
3. To Run - Running the example.

Follow

In the first example script, we can modify the initial configuration then run:

ruby follow.rb

Follows (and mutes) are expressed by custom_json with id=follow (mutes also use id=follow).

Example custom_json operation:

{
  "id": "follow",
  "required_auths": [],
  "required_posting_auths": ["social"],
  "json": "[\"follow\",{\"follower\":\"social\",\"following\":\"alice\",\"what\":[\"blog\"]}]"
}

To broadcast this operation, use the posting wif and matching account name in required_posting_auths. There are three variables required in the json field of the above operation:

1. follower - The specific account that will select the author to follow/unfollow.
2. following - The account/author that the account would like to follow.
3. what - The type of follow operation. This variable can have one of three values: blog to follow an author, ignore to mute, and an empty string to unfollow/unmute.

Check Follow

In the second example script:

ruby check_follow.rb

The API method we’re using here is condenser.get_following. We pass the name of the account we’re checking. If the account follows more than 1,000 other accounts, we execute condenser.get_following multiple times and pass the last followed account we know about to get the next 1,000 (passing the latest follows.last each time).

We also specify blog to tell the API method that we’re looking for followed, not muted (to locate muted accounts, use ignore instead of blog).

To Run

First, set up your workstation using the steps provided in Getting Started. Then you can create and execute the script (or clone from this repository):

git clone git@github.com:steemit/devportal-tutorials-rb.git
cd devportal-tutorials-rb/tutorials/18_follow_another_user
bundle install
ruby follow.rb

Example Output

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "result": {
    "id": "025688e27999d3aa514f1f0b77c9f8d8dae31d72",
    "block_num": 26349355,
    "trx_num": 3,
    "expired": false
  },
  "id": 3
}