Twitter Python Example (Barebones)

A bot that demonstrates an example of the Tweepy library for Python. Currently, this bot is a template that shows how to set up and log in to the Twitter API with a bot that is connected to a user account. Other than that, it doesn't do much of anything else.

Installation

Install the prerequisites using the requirements.txt file.

Linux / Mac

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Windows

py -3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

This tutorial provides an example of how to make a bot using the Twitter API pages.

The Twitter API uses a few variables to authenticate your bot and allow it to connect. These are the access_token, and the access_token_secret. These variables can be found on the Twitter API dashboard.

This Twitter App will connect to user accounts on their behalf, and ask if they want to allow permission for the app to connect. These are the consumer_key and consumer_secret.

Do not hard-code these variables, or upload them in any public form. One good practice is to store these in a file. This project uses a config ini file, which is specified in the .gitignore file, so it doesn't get uploaded. If you accidentally leak one of these values, go to your Twitter API dashboard and reset your tokens.

To set up your confiugration, make a file called config.ini. Edit the file with the following contents, fill in the blanks with your tokens:

[Twitter]
consumer_key=
consumer_secret=
access_token=
access_token_secret=

No need to wrap the values in quotes. Ensure that there is no whitespace following = characters.

A common alternative to using a configuration file is to use environment variables, but I don't implement that here.

Running the Bot

Use the following command if you are running Linux / Mac.

python3 bot.py /path/to/config.ini

Windows

py -3 bot.py C:\path\to\config.ini

The first argument must be the path to the config.ini file.

The output should be something like this:

Using config file located at: /path/to/config.ini
tweepy version XXXX
connected to api as user USERNAME

Where XXXX is the latest version of the tweepy library, and USERNAME is the username of the consumer login tokens you provided in the config.ini.