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Getting Twitter API Access

We're going to make a Twitter bot! Unfortunately we have to jump through way too many hoops to get to that point.

1. Make a master Twitter account

If you don't have one already, visit twitter.com and make an account for yourself.

1a. Confirm your email address

You'll need to check your email and confirm, just so they know who you are.

1b. Add your phone number to your Twitter account

And since email addresses just aren't enough, you'll also need to add your phone number to your account. Otherwise your bot will only be able to read from Twitter, not write to Twitter!

Be sure to turn off the text notifications after you confirm your phone.

2. Create an Application

Now hop on over to http://apps.twitter.com and create a new Twitter application. "But this isn't an application" you yell! Twitter doesn't care about your semantics, though, this is just how Twitter manages all of your API keys.

2a. Creating the Application

Don't stress too much about your application details, you're going to be the only one seeing them. They're mostly important if you're getting other people to sign up for your application.

2b. Permissions

Now you'll want to make sure you can write two twitter. Select the Permissions tab on your project page...

...and set it to Read and Write. Then save.

2c. API Keys

Now you're going to need to grab your API keys.

Copy them into a new IPython Notebook, calling them consumer_token and consumer_secret.

consumer_token = 'blahblahblah'
consumer_secret = 'blahblahblah'

We aren't calling them api_key and api_secret because all code ever made ever in history ever ever calls them consumer_token and consumer_secret.

3. Create a Twitter account for your bot

Your Twitter bot needs to use a different account than your real, live primary account. You'll need to sign out of your main Twitter account and create a new account.

I recommend giving it a plus addressing email address, where you do +blahblahblah after your email username - you'll still get the emails, but it acts like it's a separate account.

4. Authorize your bot

Now we need to authorize our robot account for the application.

4a. Installing tweepy

From your IPython notebook that includes consumer_key and consumer_secret, let's install tweepy, a module for interacting with Twitter. From Terminal you'll want to run

pip install tweepy

or if it complains about permissions, use sudo

sudo pip install tweepy

4b. OAuth

Now we need to authenticate with Twitter. Tweepy's outline for this is

  1. Get a request token from twitter
  2. Redirect user to twitter.com to authorize our application
  3. Get the verifier code from the user.
  4. Exchange the authorized request token for an access token.

Sounds like fun, right? Let's do it.

import tweepy
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_token, consumer_secret)

Now get the authorization URL we'll need to visit

auth.get_authorization_url()

Mine was something like https://api.twitter.com/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=eUOvtXeDBfntN0OQI123znvgLG9fSFFRRWQNyV703KPs. Visit this URL in your browser, while signed in as the bot account.

It will ask you to confirm that you'd like to grant access to the application, you say yes, then you're giving a special code.

Now hop back to your IPython notebook and feed it to tweepy.

pin = '8640XXXX'

Run the authorization code

token = auth.get_access_token(verifier=pin)

and now get your keys

print token.key 
print token.secret

and save them somewhere

access_token = token.key
access_secret = token.secret

Additionally, copy and paste these values into a comment, you don't want to try to authenticate again.

4c. Test it out

api = tweepy.API(auth)
api.update_status('done and done')

Now visit http://twitter.com/yourusername and see your brand-new post!

5. Your glorious, robotic future

Whenever you're using your bot, you're going to need the access key + secret, as well as your consumer key + secret. If you start a new notebook to do that, you'll use

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_token, consumer_secret)
auth.secure = True
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth)

to create your tweetable API object, and then

api.update_status('done and done')

to tweet. Want to know what all tweepy can do? Check out the docs!