3 min to read

How to create a Twitter bot

Step by step creation of a twitter bot

Featured image

1. Request your developer account & create your first app

The first step of building twitter bots is to request access to developer features, this can be done easily in developer.twitter.com

Once you have fill the form to request access, you can log in the twitter console to retrieve the access keys:

2. Set-up dev environment

We are going to use Tweepy, a python library to facilitate the communication with twitter API. To create the python environment and install Tweepy we need to execute the following commands:

python3 -m venv venv
source ./venv/bin/activate
pip install tweepy

After that we need to create our first python script to verify keys and environment (test-credentials.py)

import tweepy

# Authentication
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler("CONSUMER_API_KEY", "CONSUMER_API_SECRET")
auth.set_access_token("ACCESS_TOKEN", "ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET")
api = tweepy.API(auth)

try:
    api.verify_credentials()
    print("Authentication OK")
except:
    print("Error during authentication")

Run the script by executing:

python test-credentials.py

3. Playing with the API

Tweepy provides a really simple way to retrieve/create twitter information.

Retrieve your timeline

# ...

# Retrieve timeline
timeline = api.home_timeline()
for tweet in timeline:
    print(f"{tweet.user.name} said {tweet.text}")

Publish a new tweet

api.update_status("Hello World from Tweepy")

Retrieve info of any user

user = api.get_user("JaimeDeArcos")

print("User details:")
print(user)

print("Last 20 Followers:")
for follower in user.followers():
    print(follower.name)

Creating your first bot - Follow anyone who follows you

In this example we are going to create a bot which:

import tweepy, time

# Authentication
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler("CONSUMER_API_KEY", "CONSUMER_API_SECRET")
auth.set_access_token("ACCESS_TOKEN", "ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET")
api = tweepy.API(auth, wait_on_rate_limit=True, wait_on_rate_limit_notify=True)

# Verify authentication
try:
    api.verify_credentials()
    print("Authentication OK")
except:
    print("Error during authentication")

while True:
    # Retrieve followers
    for follower in tweepy.Cursor(api.followers).items():
        if not follower.following:
            print("New Follower -> {}".format(follower.name))
            follower.follow()
    # Sleep for 2 minutes 
    time.sleep(120)

Simple, right? now you can improve the script with whatever use case you need. This script could be running locally or maybe you would deploy it on any provider of your choice (AWS, Azure, google cloud…)

References & links