Building A Twitter Bot

Twitter makes it very easy for developers to use their API with reasonable rate limits.

Requirements

1. Email address to register Twitter Account

2. Mobile phone number to use the Developer API

3. A Server to host your Twitter Bot

Getting Started

There are 2 kinds of developer programs: Standard and Enterprise. We are going to cover only the basics of the Standard developer program. Go to https://apps.twitter.com/ and create an app. 

Now that you have your ACCESS TOKEN, ACCESS SECRET, CONSUMER KEY and CONSUMER SECRET you have all the authentication required to program your twitter bot, in our case using Python.

Twitter Bot

	from random import randint
	from time import sleep
	from tweepy import OAuthHandler, API
	#https://apps.twitter.com/
	ACCESS_TOKEN = 'your access token'
	ACCESS_SECRET = 'your access secret'
	CONSUMER_KEY = 'your consumer key'
	CONSUMER_SECRET = 'your consumer secret'
	# Initiate the connection to Twitter API
	Auth = OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
	Auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_TOKEN, ACCESS_SECRET)
	TwitterBot = API(Auth)
	while True:
	message = "Your tweet!"
	TwitterBot.update_status(message)
	#TwitterBot.update_with_media("image.jpg", status=message)
	sleep(randint(3000, 3600)*24) # wait for approximately 1 day

view raw twitterbot_template.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The code is pretty simple. You will need to pip install tweepy and that's it. The while loop is optional you are free to use any other scheduling method like crontab. As shown in the snippet you can either post a simple status or a status with an image. There are a lot more that you can do with the library http://docs.tweepy.org/en/v3.5.0/api.html

As usual drop a comment if you have any question!