twilight
v1.0.5
Published
Twitter API tools
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twilight
Tools for accessing the Twitter API v1.1 with paranoid timeouts and de-pagination.
Node.js
twitter-curl
for querying the streaming API (/sample.json
and/filter.json
).rtcount
for pulling out the retweets from a stream of JSON tweets, and counting them.
Python
json2ttv2
converts directories full of Twitter.json
files into.ttv2
files, bzip2'ing them, and ensuring that the result is within a reasonable size of the source (greater than 2%, but less than 6%) before deleting the original json.twitter-user
pulls down the ~3,200 (max) tweets that are accessible for a given user (also depends on the~/.twitter
auth file).
Crawling quickstart
Install from npm
:
npm install -g twilight
Or github (to make sure you're getting the most up-to-date version):
npm install -g git://github.com/chbrown/twilight
Authenticate
This app uses only OAuth 1.0A, which is mandatory. As of June 11, 2013, basic HTTP authentication is disabled in the Twitter Streaming API. So get some OAuth credentials together real quick and make a csv file that looks like this:
| consumer_key | consumer_secret | access_token | access_token_secret | |--------------|-----------------|--------------|---------------------| | ziurk0An7... | VKmTsGrk2JjH... | 91505165... | VcLOIzA0mkiCSbU... | | 63Yp9EG4t... | DhrlIQBMUaoL... | 91401882... | XJa4HQKMgqfd7ee... | | ... | ... | ... | ... |
There must be a header line with exactly the following values:
- consumer_key
- consumer_secret
- access_token
- access_token_secret
Tab / space seperated is fine, and any other columns will simply be ignored, e.g., if you want to record the screen_name
of each account. Also, order doesn't matter -- your headers just have to line up with their values.
The twitter-curl
script expects to find this file at ~/.twitter
,
but you can specify a different path with the --accounts
command line argument.
From my /etc/supervisor/conf.d/*
(See http://supervisord.org/ to get that all set up.)
[program:justinnnnnn]
user=chbrown
command=twitter-curl
--filter "track=loveyabiebs,belieber,bietastrophe"
--file /data/twitter/justin_TIMESTAMP.json
--timeout 86400
--interval 3600
--ttv2
twitter-curl
options
--accounts
should point to a file with OAuth Twitter account credentials. Currently, the script will simply use a random row from this file.--filter
can be anytrack=whatever
orlocations=-18,14,68,44
etc. Aquerystring
-parsable string. If no filter is specified, it will use the spritzer at/sample.json
--file
shouldn't require creating any directions, and the TIMESTAMP bit will be replaced by a filesystem-friendly iso representation of whenever the program is started.
// Specifically:
var stamp = new Date().toISOString().replace(/:/g, '-').replace(/\..+/, '');
// stamp == '2013-06-07T15-47-49'
--timeout
(seconds) the program will die with error code 1 after this amount of time. Don't specify a timeout if you don't want this.--interval
(seconds) the amount of time to allow for silence from Twitter before dying. Also exits with code 1. Defaults to 600 (10 minutes).--ttv2
(boolean) output TTV2 normalized flat tweets instead of full JSON.
Because in most cases of error the script simply dies, this approach only really makes sense if you're putting it behind some process monitor. (By the way, I've tried most of them: monitd, daemontools's svc, god, bluepill, node-forever---and supervisord is by far the best.)
The script does not abide by any Twitter backoff requirement, but I've never
had any trouble with backoff being enforced by Twitter. It's more than curl,
though, because it checks that it's receiving data. Often, with curl
and
PycURL
, my connection would be dropped by Twitter, but no end signal would be sent.
My crawler would simply hang, expecting data, but would not try to reconnect.
But beyond that, without --ttv2
, it doesn't provide anything more than curl
.
TTV2
TTV2 is the Tweet tab-separated format version 2, the specification is below. Fields are 1-indexed for easy AWKing (see Markdown source for 0-indexing).
- tweet_id
- created_at parsed into YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS, implicitly UTC
- text, newlines and tabs converted to spaces, html entities replaced, t.co urls resolved
- lon,lat
- place_id
- place_str
- in_reply_to_status_id
- in_reply_to_screen_name
- retweet_id id of the original tweet
- retweet_count
- user.screen_name
- user.id
- user.created_at parsed into YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS
- user.name
- user.description
- user.location
- user.url
- user.statuses_count
- user.followers_count
- user.friends_count
- user.favourites_count
- user.geo_enabled
- user.default_profile
- user.time_zone
- user.lang
- user.utc_offset
This format is not the default, and will be the output only when you use the --ttv2
option.
Examples
Install json first: npm install json
. It's awesome.
twilight stream --filter 'track=bootstrap' | jq -r -c .text
twilight stream --filter 'track=bootstrap' | jq -c '{user.screen_name, text}'
twilight stream --filter 'track=انتخابات' | jq -r -c .text
twilight stream --filter 'track=sarcmark,%F0%9F%91%8F' | jq -r -c .text
It supports unicode: انتخابات is Arabic for "elections," and decodeURIComponent('%F0%9F%91%8F')
is the "CLAPPING HANDS" (U+1F44F) character.
If you use a filter with url-escaped characters in supervisord, note that supervisord Python-interpolates strings, so you'll need to escape the percent signs, e.g.:
[program:slowclap]
command=twitter-curl --filter "track=%%F0%%9F%%91%%8F" --file /tmp/slowclap.json
TTV2 Example
Instead of JSON, you can use AWK to look at the TTV2:
twitter-curl --filter 'track=data,science' --ttv2 | awk 'BEGIN{FS="\t"}{print $4,$3}'
Stats
- RSS usage per-process is between 20-40MB.
- VSZ on a machine running six of these crawlers is 80-90MB.
License
Copyright 2011-2015 Christopher Brown. MIT Licensed.