Twitter's apparently the rage these days. I've decided to get into it by posting updates to this site, pushes to my Github, and other code-related things, automatically on Twitter.
This is harder than it sounds, mostly because Twitter's API is tricky to work with, and also partially due to confusing and faulty tools. I'm going to outline the basic steps I took to make my Twitter integration work, and also point out that this took me days. For comparison, my RSS feed took me around two minutes to implement, test, and deploy. (Oh, did I mention? I have an RSS feed now!)
First things first. In Python, there are a few different libraries available to do Twitter API calls. Confusingly, they all have the same module name, twitter, meaning that this statement is frustratingly ambiguous:
>>> import twitter
Which library did I just import?
The most common one is called python-twitter and it is usually available as a package of the same name in your distro of choice. At least Debian (and Ubuntu), Fedora, and Gentoo (via an overlay) have it. This is not the right library. In about a week, Twitter will turn off the basic authentication, totally disabling most deployed versions of this library.
Instead, use the Python Twitter Tools. This package, available on PyPI as twitter, works with the newer OAuth system being deployed on Twitter, and will work into the future.
So, OAuth. This is kind of tricky, and I'm not going to go into the gory details. Suffice it to say that you need two pairs of keys: A consumer pair, from Twitter's API service, and a token pair, from the user you're going to post tweets as. To get consumer keys, you will need to go to http://dev.twitter.com/apps and register a new application. Make sure you specify Client access instead of Browser access. Now, go back to your Python shell, and do the following:
>>> import twitter.oauth_dance
>>> app_name = "my application" # use the info from the twitter app
>>> key = "mumbo-jumbo" # the consumer key
>>> secret = "secret-agent-man" # and the consumer secret
>>> twitter.oauth_dance.oauth_dance(app_name, key, secret)
Follow the instructions, and you'll get a tuple containing your token key and secret. Now just add the following to your client and you'll be set!
# Obviously, these are not real keys! Follow the instructions above to get
# real keys.
consumer_key = "mumbo-jumbo"
consumer_secret = "secret-agent-man"
token_key = "number-with-random-letters"
token_secret = "mission-impossible"
oauth = twitter.OAuth(token_key, token_secret,
consumer_key, consumer_secret)
twitter.Twitter(auth=oauth).statuses.update(status=message)
The library follows the same pattern as the official Twitter API, so this is equivalent to requesting statuses/update.json with a status parameter.
~ C.
Created on Aug 09, 2010
Last modified on Aug 09, 2010
