4 [![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/sixohsix/twitter.svg)](https://travis-ci.org/sixohsix/twitter)
6 The Minimalist Twitter API for Python is a Python API for Twitter,
7 everyone's favorite Web 2.0 Facebook-style status updater for people
10 Also included is a twitter command-line tool for getting your friends'
11 tweets and setting your own tweet from the safety and security of your
12 favorite shell and an IRC bot that can announce Twitter updates to an
15 For more information, after installing the `twitter` package:
17 * import the `twitter` package and run help() on it
18 * run `twitter -h` for command-line tool help
21 twitter - The Command-Line Tool
22 -------------------------------
24 The command-line tool lets you do some awesome things:
26 * view your tweets, recent replies, and tweets in lists
27 * view the public timeline
28 * follow and unfollow (leave) friends
29 * various output formats for tweet information
31 The bottom line: type `twitter`, receive tweets.
35 twitterbot - The IRC Bot
36 ------------------------
38 The IRC bot is associated with a twitter account (either your own account or an
39 account you create for the bot). The bot announces all tweets from friends
40 it is following. It can be made to follow or leave friends through IRC /msg
47 `twitter-log` is a simple command-line tool that dumps all public
48 tweets from a given user in a simple text format. It is useful to get
49 a complete offsite backup of all your tweets. Run `twitter-log` and
50 read the instructions.
52 twitter-archiver and twitter-follow
53 -----------------------------------
55 twitter-archiver will log all the tweets posted by any user since they
56 started posting. twitter-follow will print a list of all of all the
57 followers of a user (or all the users that user follows).
60 Programming with the Twitter api classes
61 ========================================
64 The Twitter and TwitterStream classes are the key to building your own
65 Twitter-enabled applications.
71 The minimalist yet fully featured Twitter API class.
73 Get RESTful data by accessing members of this class. The result
74 is decoded python objects (lists and dicts).
76 The Twitter API is documented at:
78 **[http://dev.twitter.com/doc](http://dev.twitter.com/doc)**
86 # see "Authentication" section below for tokens and keys
88 auth=OAuth(OAUTH_TOKEN, OAUTH_SECRET,
89 CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
92 # Get your "home" timeline
93 t.statuses.home_timeline()
95 # Get a particular friend's timeline
96 t.statuses.user_timeline(screen_name="billybob")
98 # to pass in GET/POST parameters, such as `count`
99 t.statuses.home_timeline(count=5)
101 # to pass in the GET/POST parameter `id` you need to use `_id`
102 t.statuses.oembed(_id=1234567890)
106 status="Using @sixohsix's sweet Python Twitter Tools.")
108 # Send a direct message
109 t.direct_messages.new(
111 text="I think yer swell!")
113 # Get the members of tamtar's list "Things That Are Rad"
114 t._("tamtar")._("things-that-are-rad").members()
116 # Note how the magic `_` method can be used to insert data
117 # into the middle of a call. You can also use replacement:
118 t.user.list.members(user="tamtar", list="things-that-are-rad")
120 # An *optional* `_timeout` parameter can also be used for API
121 # calls which take much more time than normal or Twitter stops
122 # responding for some reason
123 t.users.lookup(screen_name=','.join(A_LIST_OF_100_SCREEN_NAMES), _timeout=1)
125 # Overriding Method: GET/POST
126 # you should not need to use this method as this library properly
127 # detects whether GET or POST should be used, Nevertheless
128 # to force a particular method, use `_method`
129 t.statuses.oembed(_id=1234567890, _method='GET')
135 # Search for the latest tweets about #pycon
136 t.search.tweets(q="#pycon")
139 Using the data returned
140 -----------------------
142 Twitter API calls return decoded JSON. This is converted into
143 a bunch of Python lists, dicts, ints, and strings. For example::
146 x = twitter.statuses.home_timeline()
148 # The first 'tweet' in the timeline
151 # The screen name of the user who wrote the first 'tweet'
152 x[0]['user']['screen_name']
158 If you prefer to get your Twitter data in XML format, pass
159 format="xml" to the Twitter object when you instantiate it::
162 twitter = Twitter(format="xml")
165 The output will not be parsed in any way. It will be a raw string
169 The TwitterStream class
170 -----------------------
172 The TwitterStream object is an interface to the Twitter Stream API
173 (stream.twitter.com). This can be used pretty much the same as the
174 Twitter class except the result of calling a method will be an
175 iterator that yields objects decoded from the stream. For
179 twitter_stream = TwitterStream(auth=UserPassAuth('joe', 'joespassword'))
180 iterator = twitter_stream.statuses.sample()
182 for tweet in iterator:
183 # ...do something with this tweet...
186 The iterator will yield tweets forever and ever (until the stream
187 breaks at which point it raises a TwitterHTTPError.)
189 The `block` parameter controls if the stream is blocking. Default
190 is blocking (True). When set to False, the iterator will
191 occasionally yield None when there is no available message.
193 Per default the ``TwitterStream`` object uses
194 [public streams](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/streams/public).
195 If you want to use one of the other
196 [streaming APIs](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis), specify the URL
199 - [Public streams](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/streams/public): stream.twitter.com
200 - [User streams](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/streams/user): userstream.twitter.com
201 - [Site streams](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/streams/site): sitestream.twitter.com
203 Note that you require the proper
204 [permissions](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/application-permission-model) to
205 access these streams. E.g. for direct messages your
206 [application](https://dev.twitter.com/apps) needs the "Read, Write & Direct
207 Messages" permission.
209 The following example demonstrates how to retrieve all new direct messages
210 from the user stream:
214 consumer_key='[your consumer key]',
215 consumer_secret='[your consumer secret]',
216 token='[your token]',
217 token_secret='[your token secret]'
219 twitter_userstream = TwitterStream(auth=auth, domain='userstream.twitter.com')
220 for msg in twitter_userstream.user():
221 if 'direct_message' in msg:
222 print msg['direct_message']['text']
225 Twitter Response Objects
226 ------------------------
228 Response from a Twitter request. Behaves like a list or a string
229 (depending on requested format) but it has a few other interesting
232 `headers` gives you access to the response headers as an
233 httplib.HTTPHeaders instance. You can do
234 `response.headers.getheader('h')` to retrieve a header.
239 You can authenticate with Twitter in three ways: NoAuth, OAuth, or
240 UserPassAuth. Get help() on these classes to learn how to use them.
242 OAuth is probably the most useful.
248 Visit the Twitter developer page and create a new application:
250 **[https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new](https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new)**
252 This will get you a CONSUMER_KEY and CONSUMER_SECRET.
254 When users run your application they have to authenticate your app
255 with their Twitter account. A few HTTP calls to Twitter are required
256 to do this. Please see the twitter.oauth_dance module to see how this
257 is done. If you are making a command-line app, you can use the
258 oauth_dance() function directly.
260 Performing the "oauth dance" gets you an oauth token and oauth secret
261 that authenticate the user with Twitter. You should save these for
262 later so that the user doesn't have to do the oauth dance again.
264 read_token_file and write_token_file are utility methods to read and
265 write OAuth token and secret key values. The values are stored as
266 strings in the file. Not terribly exciting.
268 Finally, you can use the OAuth authenticator to connect to Twitter. In
269 code it all goes like this::
272 from twitter import *
274 MY_TWITTER_CREDS = os.path.expanduser('~/.my_app_credentials')
275 if not os.path.exists(MY_TWITTER_CREDS):
276 oauth_dance("My App Name", CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET,
279 oauth_token, oauth_secret = read_token_file(MY_TWITTER_CREDS)
281 twitter = Twitter(auth=OAuth(
282 oauth_token, oauth_secret, CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET))
284 # Now work with Twitter
285 twitter.statuses.update(status='Hello, world!')
292 Python Twitter Tools are released under an MIT License.