4 The Minimalist Twitter API for Python is a Python API for Twitter,
5 everyone's favorite Web 2.0 Facebook-style status updater for people
8 Also included is a twitter command-line tool for getting your friends'
9 tweets and setting your own tweet from the safety and security of your
10 favorite shell and an IRC bot that can announce Twitter updates to an
13 For more information, after installing the `twitter` package:
15 * import the `twitter` package and run help() on it
16 * run `twitter -h` for command-line tool help
19 twitter - The Command-Line Tool
20 -------------------------------
22 The command-line tool lets you do some awesome things:
24 * view your tweets, recent replies, and tweets in lists
25 * view the public timeline
26 * follow and unfollow (leave) friends
27 * various output formats for tweet information
29 The bottom line: type `twitter`, receive tweets.
33 twitterbot - The IRC Bot
34 ------------------------
36 The IRC bot is associated with a twitter account (either your own account or an
37 account you create for the bot). The bot announces all tweets from friends
38 it is following. It can be made to follow or leave friends through IRC /msg
45 `twitter-log` is a simple command-line tool that dumps all public
46 tweets from a given user in a simple text format. It is useful to get
47 a complete offsite backup of all your tweets. Run `twitter-log` and
48 read the instructions.
50 twitter-archiver and twitter-follow
51 -----------------------------------
53 twitter-archiver will log all the tweets posted by any user since they
54 started posting. twitter-follow will print a list of all of all the
55 followers of a user (or all the users that user follows).
58 Programming with the Twitter api classes
59 ========================================
62 The Twitter and TwitterStream classes are the key to building your own
63 Twitter-enabled applications.
69 The minimalist yet fully featured Twitter API class.
71 Get RESTful data by accessing members of this class. The result
72 is decoded python objects (lists and dicts).
74 The Twitter API is documented at:
76 **[http://dev.twitter.com/doc](http://dev.twitter.com/doc)**
84 # see "Authentication" section below for tokens and keys
86 auth=OAuth(OAUTH_TOKEN, OAUTH_SECRET,
87 CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
90 # Get your "home" timeline
91 t.statuses.home_timeline()
93 # Get a particular friend's timeline
94 t.statuses.friends_timeline(id="billybob")
96 # Also supported (but totally weird)
97 t.statuses.friends_timeline.billybob()
99 # to pass in GET/POST parameters, such as `count`
100 t.statuses.home_timeline(count=5)
102 # to pass in the GET/POST parameter `id` you need to use `_id`
103 t.statuses.oembed(_id=1234567890)
107 status="Using @sixohsix's sweet Python Twitter Tools.")
109 # Send a direct message
110 t.direct_messages.new(
112 text="I think yer swell!")
114 # Get the members of tamtar's list "Things That Are Rad"
115 t._("tamtar")._("things-that-are-rad").members()
117 # Note how the magic `_` method can be used to insert data
118 # into the middle of a call. You can also use replacement:
119 t.user.list.members(user="tamtar", list="things-that-are-rad")
121 # An *optional* `_timeout` parameter can also be used for API
122 # calls which take much more time than normal or twitter stops
123 # responding for some reasone
124 t.users.lookup(screen_name=','.join(A_LIST_OF_100_SCREEN_NAMES), _timeout=1)
126 # Overriding Method: GET/POST
127 # you should not need to use this method as this library properly
128 # detects whether GET or POST should be used, Nevertheless
129 # to force a particular method, use `_method`
130 t.statuses.oembed(_id=1234567890, _method='GET')
136 # Search for the latest tweets about #pycon
137 t.search.tweets(q="#pycon")
140 Using the data returned
141 -----------------------
143 Twitter API calls return decoded JSON. This is converted into
144 a bunch of Python lists, dicts, ints, and strings. For example::
147 x = twitter.statuses.home_timeline()
149 # The first 'tweet' in the timeline
152 # The screen name of the user who wrote the first 'tweet'
153 x[0]['user']['screen_name']
159 If you prefer to get your Twitter data in XML format, pass
160 format="xml" to the Twitter object when you instantiate it::
163 twitter = Twitter(format="xml")
166 The output will not be parsed in any way. It will be a raw string
170 The TwitterStream class
171 -----------------------
173 The TwitterStream object is an interface to the Twitter Stream API
174 (stream.twitter.com). This can be used pretty much the same as the
175 Twitter class except the result of calling a method will be an
176 iterator that yields objects decoded from the stream. For
180 twitter_stream = TwitterStream(auth=UserPassAuth('joe', 'joespassword'))
181 iterator = twitter_stream.statuses.sample()
183 for tweet in iterator:
184 # ...do something with this tweet...
187 The iterator will yield tweets forever and ever (until the stream
188 breaks at which point it raises a TwitterHTTPError.)
190 The `block` parameter controls if the stream is blocking. Default
191 is blocking (True). When set to False, the iterator will
192 occasionally yield None when there is no available message.
194 Per default the ``TwitterStream`` object uses
195 [public streams](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/streams/public).
196 If you want to use one of the other
197 [streaming APIs](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis), specify the URL
200 - [Public streams](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/streams/public): stream.twitter.com
201 - [User streams](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/streams/user): userstream.twitter.com
202 - [Site streams](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis/streams/site): sitestream.twitter.com
204 Note that you require the proper
205 [permissions](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/application-permission-model) to
206 access these streams. E.g. for direct messages your
207 [application](https://dev.twitter.com/apps) needs the "Read, Write & Direct
208 Messages" permission.
210 The following example demonstrates how to retreive all new direct messages
211 from the user stream:
215 consumer_key='[your consumer key]',
216 consumer_secret='[your consumer secret]',
217 token='[your token]',
218 token_secret='[your token secret]'
220 twitter_userstream = TwitterStream(auth=auth, domain='userstream.twitter.com')
221 for msg in twitter_userstream.user():
222 if 'direct_message' in msg:
223 print msg['direct_message']['text']
226 Twitter Response Objects
227 ------------------------
229 Response from a twitter request. Behaves like a list or a string
230 (depending on requested format) but it has a few other interesting
233 `headers` gives you access to the response headers as an
234 httplib.HTTPHeaders instance. You can do
235 `response.headers.getheader('h')` to retrieve a header.
240 You can authenticate with Twitter in three ways: NoAuth, OAuth, or
241 UserPassAuth. Get help() on these classes to learn how to use them.
243 OAuth is probably the most useful.
249 Visit the Twitter developer page and create a new application:
251 **[https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new](https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new)**
253 This will get you a CONSUMER_KEY and CONSUMER_SECRET.
255 When users run your application they have to authenticate your app
256 with their Twitter account. A few HTTP calls to twitter are required
257 to do this. Please see the twitter.oauth_dance module to see how this
258 is done. If you are making a command-line app, you can use the
259 oauth_dance() function directly.
261 Performing the "oauth dance" gets you an ouath token and oauth secret
262 that authenticate the user with Twitter. You should save these for
263 later so that the user doesn't have to do the oauth dance again.
265 read_token_file and write_token_file are utility methods to read and
266 write OAuth token and secret key values. The values are stored as
267 strings in the file. Not terribly exciting.
269 Finally, you can use the OAuth authenticator to connect to Twitter. In
270 code it all goes like this::
273 from twitter import *
275 MY_TWITTER_CREDS = os.path.expanduser('~/.my_app_credentials')
276 if not os.path.exists(MY_TWITTER_CREDS):
277 oauth_dance("My App Name", CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET,
280 oauth_token, oauth_secret = read_token_file(MY_TWITTER_CREDS)
282 twitter = Twitter(auth=OAuth(
283 oauth_token, oauth_secret, CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET))
285 # Now work with Twitter
286 twitter.statuses.update(status='Hello, world!')
293 Python Twitter Tools are released under an MIT License.