A simple and direct interface to the Twitter APIs in Python 3.

twitter_api_client is a concise tool for calling the Twitter APIs. Its main purpose is testing and CLI scripting, so it merely handles the OAuth protocol, leaving everything else as raw as possible. It doesn't wrap the responses into custom objects. It doesn't obscure the request parameters.

twitter_api_client works solely on the standard library, so there are no dependencies.

You must, however, have a valid consumer key and secret, as well as an access token and secret.

You can create an app at https://dev.twitter.com/apps . From there, you can obtain your consumer and access token credentials.

Please make sure to setup your app with the appropriate permissions. If you will be using POST APIs (e.g. tweeting), you must choose the read/write permissions.

Just copy the twitter_api_client.py file to your working directory.

Make sure you populate the KEYCHAIN dictionary at the top of the file with your own credentials.

If you just run the file as a script, it should give a (possibly garbled) list of the current trending topics. If you run into any errors, something is probably wrong. Feel free to shout out to me, I'd be glad to help if I can.

The api_call(base_url, method, params, post_data={}) function is the main interface. The arguments are:

base_url The base url of the API resource. Starts with https:// and ends with .json

method Either GET or POST. Detailed list of resources and methods at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1

params Dictionary of parameters for GET requests.

post_data Dictionary of parameters for POST requests. Empty by default, so can be omitted for GET requests.

All API calls return the full JSON response, converted into a Python dictionary or list.

Global trending topics

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/trends/place

import twitter_api_client as tac
base_url = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/trends/place.json"
method = "GET"
params = {"id": "1"}
response = tac.api_call(base_url, method, params)

Search for tweets

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/search/tweets

import twitter_api_client as tac
base_url = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json"
method = "GET"
params = {"q": "python", "result_type": "recent", "count": "20"}
response = tac.api_call(base_url, method, params)

Post a tweet for the authenticated user

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/post/statuses/update

import twitter_api_client as tac
base_url = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/update.json"
method = "POST"
params = {}
post_data = {"status": "I ate my cat for breakfast!"}
response = tac.api_call(base_url, method, params, post_data)

twitter_api_client is open sourced under GPLv3.