It should probably be you or your organization.
Here, you have to select the Twitter user responsible for this account. Go to the Twitter developer site to apply for a developer account. Step 1: Apply for a Twitter Developer Account Otherwise, you have to sign up as a Twitter user before proceeding. If you already have a Twitter user account, then follow these steps to create the key, token, and secrets. So you need to create the required authentication credentials to be able to use the API. Remove ads Creating Twitter API Authentication CredentialsĪs we have previously seen, the Twitter API requires that all requests use OAuth to authenticate. The first step is to create a directory and a virtual environment: You can get started by creating a project called tweepy-bots. For more information on virtual environments and pip, check out Python Virtual Environments: A Primer and What Is Pip? A Guide for New Pythonistas. In this article, we’re going to use a virtual environment ( virtualenv) for the projects to avoid depending on system-wide packages. Tweepy can be installed using pip, a Python package manager.
In this section, you’ll learn how to install Tweepy for development, configure authentication credentials, and interact with the Twitter API. The only current limitation, as of version 3.7.0, is that Direct Messages don’t work properly due to some recent changes in the Twitter API. Instead, thanks to Tweepy, you can focus on the functionality you want to build.Īlmost all the functionality provided by Twitter API can be used through Tweepy. This could be time consuming and prone to error. If you weren’t using Tweepy, then you would have to deal with low-level details having to do with HTTP requests, data serialization, authentication, and rate limits. Tweepy includes a set of classes and methods that represent Twitter’s models and API endpoints, and it transparently handles various implementation details, such as: Tweepy is an open source Python package that gives you a very convenient way to access the Twitter API with Python. You can find more information about the Twitter API’s policies and limits in its official documentation: You must consider this while designing and implementing bots to avoid unnecessary waits. If you exceed these limits, you’ll have to wait between 5 and 15 minutes to be able to use the API again. The Twitter API also imposes rate limits about how frequently you’re allowed to invoke API methods. The development of tools to spam, mislead users, and so on is forbidden. This is done to guarantee users a good experience. Keep in mind that Twitter imposes certain restrictions and policies about what you can and cannot build using its API. You can leverage the Twitter API to build different kinds of automations, such as bots, analytics, and other tools. Later in this article, you’ll find detailed instructions for this. Before making any call to the Twitter API, you need to create and configure your authentication credentials. The Twitter API uses OAuth, a widely used open authorization protocol, to authenticate all the requests. Tweepy, as we’ll see later, provides a way to invoke those HTTP endpoints without dealing with low-level details. Technically, the API exposes dozens of HTTP endpoints related to: You can use the API to read and write information related to Twitter entities such as tweets, users, and trends. The Twitter API gives developers access to most of Twitter’s functionality. Through this article, you’ll learn how to build programs that interact with Twitter in much more interesting and complex ways. This is just a little example of what you can do with Tweepy. We will see later in this article how the authentication works and how you can create the required authentication key, token, and secrets.
In the code snippet, we used update_status() to create a new Tweet. Objects belonging to the tweepy.API class offer a vast set of methods that you can use to access almost all Twitter functionality.
Import tweepy # Authenticate to Twitter auth = tweepy.