Python

Make a Twitter Bot 🤖 Easily

Jessi B.

Nov 1, 2020 • 4 min read

Twitter bots! It’s all the buzz — like 2 years ago 😅 Anyway, now they’re really easy to make. Let’s do it!

Ready, Set, Go!

Be sure to check the install pip checkbox during installation – that’s how you get python libraries! We’re gonna need at least one, tweepy. To get it, run this from the command prompt (win +r, “cmd”, enter) or bash:

pip install tweepy

Next apply for Twitter Developer Access!

That’s required, as it’s how you’ll get your login keys. You’ll need (4) four!

After creating a “project” (clicking next a lot) go to your projects and grab your “consumer_key” and “consumer_secret” as we’ll call them for simplicity

twitter uses slightly different names, but the order is the same

Next, get your “access_token” and your “access_secret“

make sure to put this somewhere safe for later unless you want to have to regenerate!

Do not share these! It’s basically a twitter login. Create a file (like twitterBot.py) with the .py extension and open it in your favorite editor! Ours is vscode 🤷‍♀️

Start your bot script by importing libraries (copying and pasting text into that file) like so:

import tweepy as tw

Next you will need define your login “keys” (leave the quotes!) Add:

consumer_key= 'yourkeyhere' consumer_secret= 'yourkeyhere' access_token= 'yourkeyhere' access_token_secret= 'yourkeyhere'

And then pass that information on to the Twitter API…

auth = tw.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret) auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret) api = tw.API(auth, wait_on_rate_limit=True)

Got all that added? Save, and test it by opening cmd (or bash on linux 🐧), navigate to where your python script is stored:

cd C:/Users/YOU/Desktop/twitterBot.py

And run it!

python twitterBoy.py

If you didn’t get a big scary error… rejoice! 👏 You have a python bot. Doesn’t do anything yet but hey that’s progress 🎊

Send your first tweet

Let’s make it do something. Add the following:

api.update_status("I'm posting this from python @anicyber thx bro")

Run it just like before… did it error? If not…

Go check your Twitter! It worked!! 🎉

OK so now we have a bot that can tweet. Let’s make one that searches 🔎 and likes too 💗

Searching Twitter for Tweets

Searching is as easy as posting! Pick some hashtags that you wanna search, and a date from which you want to search from (note: can’t go too far back!)

Also go ahead and remove that last “update_status” line if you don’t wanna try and tweet again (it won’t let you tweet duplicates 😉), so your script should now look like this:

If you wanna do multiple just use OR like:

search_words = "#funny OR #memes" date_since = "2020-07-10"

Then let’s fetch a list of tweets with those #hashtags

tweets = tw.Cursor(api.search, q=search_words, lang="en", since=date_since).items(5) tweets

Run it and you should see:

<tweepy.cursor.ItemIterator at 0x7facc336f211>

Without nerding out too much 🤓 … This is basically a bunch of tweets in “object form”. To properly handle one at a time you can do a loop:

tweets = tw.Cursor(api.search, q=search_words, lang="en", since=date_since).items(5) for tweet in tweets: print(tweet.text)

Run it and you should see something like:

2/2 blah blah 1/2 Obama's cool RT @anicyber wow [#horses] RT @rabbirt stfu RT @anicyber @rabbirt y'all r bretty cool

Taking out the “trash”

Retweets are like a repost with credit the OP. I prefer not to include those. To filter those our add the following right after: search_words = “#technology OR cyborg”

search_words = search_words + " -filter:retweets"

Run that, and you should get a curated list of tweets!

For now, we just want to work with one at a time, so we’re gonna change the .items(5) to a 1, like so:

tweets = tw.Cursor(api.search, q=search_words, lang="en", since=date_since).items(1)

If you’re confused, your script should look like this:

import tweepy as tw consumer_key= 'yourkeyhere' consumer_secret= 'yourkeyhere' access_token= 'yourkeyhere' access_token_secret= 'yourkeyhere' auth = tw.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret) auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret) api = tw.API(auth, wait_on_rate_limit=True) search_words = "#funny" search_words = search_words + " -filter:retweets" date_since = "2020-07-10" tweets = tw.Cursor(api.search, q=search_words, lang="en", since=date_since).items(1) for tweet in tweets: print(tweet.text)

Time to interact with ’em. Or it. The tweet.

Liking the tweet

Let’s start by liking it!

The actual liking part is… one line.

api.create_favorite(tweet.id)

To get a nice ‘lil status message to tell you what was liked, change the for loop to:

for tweet in tweets: api.create_favorite(tweet.id) print("liked: " + tweet.text)

Run it and feel proud of how supportive you’ve just been. Wanna reply too? Fine, but that’s the last one we’re doing in this article!!

Reply AND Like 💡

Again, really just a one liner…

api.update_status("Lol nice",in_reply_to_status_id = tweet.id, auto_populate_reply_metadata=True)

Add this before or after the like command to do both. Your whole script could look like:

Run that and you should see this!

liked AND replied to: IS THAT HARASSMENT?... #Overwatch #ow #edits #Pankake101 #gaming #twitch #YouTuber #fail #fails #YouTube #games… https://t.co/ZhPSJ6sVpI

Well, hopefully not that in particular. Anyway, yay 🎉 Wanna expand? Add some sleep timers, maybe do some NLP?

Start here:

The (bretty good) tweepy documentation has more queries and whatnot.
The (shitty) Twitter API documentation has a lot too.

If you liked this then check back for more 😁