The CLI takes syntactic cues from the Twitter SMS commands, however it offers vastly more commands and capabilities than are available via SMS.
gem install t # Requires Ruby :)
Twitter requires OAuth for most of its functionality, so you'll need to register a new application at http://dev.twitter.com/apps/new. Once you create your application, make sure to set your application's Access Level to "Read, Write and Access direct messages", otherwise you may receive an error that looks something like this:
Read-only application cannot POST
Once you've successfully registered your application, you'll be given a consumer key and secret, which you can use to authorize your Twitter account.
t authorize -c YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY -s YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET
This command directs you to a URL where you can sign-in to Twitter and then
enter the returned PIN back into the terminal. If you type the PIN correctly,
you should now be authorized to use t
as that user. To authorize multiple
accounts, simply repeat the last step, signing into Twitter as a different
user.
You can see a list of all the accounts you've authorized by typing the command:
t accounts
The output of which will be structured like this:
sferik
UDfNTpOz5ZDG4a6w7dIWj
uuP7Xbl2mEfGMiDu1uIyFN
gem
thG9EfWoADtIr6NjbL9ON (active)
Note: One of your authorized accounts (specifically, the last one
authorized) will be set as active. To change the active account, use the set
subcommand, passing either just a username, if it's unambiguous, or a username
and consumer key pair, like this:
t set active sferik UDfNTpOz5ZDG4a6w7dIWj
Account information is stored in a YAML-formatted file located at ~/.trc
.
Note: Anyone with access to this file can impersonate you on Twitter, so
it's important to keep it secure, just as you would treat your SSH private key.
For this reason, the file is hidden and has the permission bits set to 0600
.
Typing t help
will list all the available commands. You can type t help TASK
to get help for a specific command.
t help
t update "I'm tweeting from the command line. Isn't that special?"
Note: If your tweet includes special characters (e.g. !
), make sure to
wrap it in single quotes instead of double quotes, so those characters are not
interpreted by your shell. (However, if you use single quotes, your Tweet
obviously can't contain any apostrophes.)
t whois @sferik
t users -l @sferik @gem
t follow @sferik @gem
t does_follow @ev @sferik
Note: If the first user does not follow the second, t
will exit with a
non-zero exit code. This allows you to execute commands conditionally, for
example, send a user a direct message only if he already follows you:
t does_follow @ev && t dm @ev "What's up, bro?"
t list create following-`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`
t followings | xargs t list add following-`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`
t list members -l following-`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`
t lists -l
t friends -lf
t leaders -lf
t leaders | xargs t unfollow
t groupies | shuf | head -1 | xargs t follow
t mentions -n 10 -l | awk '{print $1}' | xargs t favorite
t timeline -n 200 --csv > timeline.csv
t stream timeline
t list members twitter team | wc -l
t search all "query"
t search all "lang:en filter:links linux torrent" -n 1 | grep -o "http://t.co/[0-9A-Za-z]*" | xargs open
t search favorites "query"
t search mentions "query"
t search retweets "query"
t search timeline "query"
t search user @sferik "query"
- Deep search: Instead of using the Twitter Search API, [which only only goes
back 6-9 days][index],
t search
fetches up to 3,200 tweets via the REST API and then checks each one against a regular expression. - Multithreaded: Whenever possible, Twitter API requests are made in parallel, resulting in faster performance for bulk operations.
- Designed for Unix: Output is designed to be piped to other Unix utilities, like grep, cut, awk, bc, wc, and xargs for advanced text processing.
- Generate spreadsheets: Convert the output of any command to CSV format simply
by adding the
--csv
flag. - 95% C0 Code Coverage: Well tested, with a 2.5:1 test-to-code ratio.
@jphpsf wrote a blog post explaining how to use t
to backup
your Twitter account.
t
was also mentioned on an episode of the Ruby 5 podcast.
If you discuss t
in a blog post or podcast, let me know and I'll
link it here.
There is some ambiguity in the terminology used to describe relationships on
Twitter. For example, some people use the term "friends" to mean everyone you
follow. In t
, "friends" refers to just the subset of people who follow you
back (i.e., friendship is bidirectional). Here is the full table of terminology
used by t
:
___________________________________________________
| | |
| YOU FOLLOW THEM | YOU DON'T FOLLOW THEM |
_________________________|_________________________|_________________________|_________________________
| | | | |
| THEY FOLLOW YOU | friends | groupies | followers |
|_________________________|_________________________|_________________________|_________________________|
| | |
| THEY DON'T FOLLOW YOU | leaders |
|_________________________|_________________________|
| |
| followings |
|_________________________|
The twitter gem previously contained a command-line interface, up until version 0.5.0, when it was removed. This project is offered as a sucessor to that effort, however it is a clean room implementation that contains none of the original code.
In the spirit of free software, everyone is encouraged to help improve this project.
Here are some ways you can contribute:
- by using alpha, beta, and prerelease versions
- by reporting bugs
- by suggesting new features
- by writing or editing documentation
- by writing specifications
- by writing code (no patch is too small: fix typos, add comments, clean up inconsistent whitespace)
- by refactoring code
- by fixing issues
- by reviewing patches
- financially
We use the GitHub issue tracker to track bugs and features. Before submitting a bug report or feature request, check to make sure it hasn't already been submitted. When submitting a bug report, please include a Gist that includes a stack trace and any details that may be necessary to reproduce the bug, including your gem version, Ruby version, and operating system. Ideally, a bug report should include a pull request with failing specs.
- Fork the repository.
- Create a topic branch.
- Add specs for your unimplemented feature or bug fix.
- Run
bundle exec rake spec
. If your specs pass, return to step 3. - Implement your feature or bug fix.
- Run
bundle exec rake spec
. If your specs fail, return to step 5. - Run
open coverage/index.html
. If your changes are not completely covered by your tests, return to step 3. - Add, commit, and push your changes.
- Submit a pull request.
This library aims to support and is tested against the following Ruby implementations:
- Ruby 1.8.7
- Ruby 1.9.2
- Ruby 1.9.3
If something doesn't work on one of these Ruby versions, it's a bug.
This library may inadvertently work (or seem to work) on other Ruby implementations, however support will only be provided for the versions listed above.
If you would like this library to support another Ruby version, you may volunteer to be a maintainer. Being a maintainer entails making sure all tests run and pass on that implementation. When something breaks on your implementation, you will be responsible for providing patches in a timely fashion. If critical issues for a particular implementation exist at the time of a major release, support for that Ruby version may be dropped.
Copyright (c) 2011 Erik Michaels-Ober. See [LICENSE][] for details. Application icon by [@nvk][nvk]. [license]: https://github.com/sferik/t/blob/master/LICENSE.md [nvk]: http://rodolfonovak.com