Twitter_Bot

Building a Twitter Bot with Python

Do you use Twitter? If so, then you must come across some of the bots that like, retweet, follow, or even reply to your tweets. But have you ever wondered how they are made? Well, it's easy as filling water in a bottle. Haha! It's really not rocket science. So, let's get started and make a bot.

In Python, the twitter bot is just a few lines of code, less than 30.

Prerequisites for making one (Bot)

1. Twitter developer account.
2. tweepy module in Python.
3. A twitter account, which you want to make a bot.

Understanding the code

You see there are no more than 30 lines in Python. Let's understand each and every line.

import tweepy
import time

To communicate with Twitter API, we need some module, here we are using tweepy. You can install it easily.

pip install tweepy

Once you install the module, write some more code.

# Authenticate to Twitter
CONSUMER_KEY = '<your-consumer-or-API-key-goes-here>'
CONSUMER_SECRET = '<your-consumer-or-API-secret-goes-here>'
ACCESS_KEY = '<your-access-key-goes-here>'
ACESS_SECRET = '<your-access-secret-goes-here>'
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_KEY, ACESS_SECRET)

This is used to authenticate your Twitter account. Remember these keys are of your account, don't share them to anyone, else they can access your data. That's why I have made some variables in which I will store the keys.

These keys will be found in your developer account, which you've saved a time ago.

auth variable is created to authenticate the account, Twitter uses OAuth to do this.
And, after that, we will set the tokens.

# Create API object
api = tweepy.API(auth, wait_on_rate_limit=True, wait_on_rate_limit_notify=True)

This class provides a wrapper for the API as provided by Twitter. If you stuck somewhere, you can always refer to the tweepy documentation.

user = api.me()
search = '#python3'
numTweet = 500
for tweet in tweepy.Cursor(api.search, search).items(numTweet):
    try:
        print('Tweet Liked')
        tweet.favorite()
        print("Retweet done")
        tweet.retweet()
        time.sleep(10)
    except tweepy.TweepError as e:
        print(e.reason)
    except StopIteration:
        break

Finally, we will tell the program to look for the keyword #python3 in a tweet and the number of tweets that will be processed once in a day. If you want to like, you can use tweepy.favorite() , and for retweet tweepy.retweet(). The reason, I'm using sleep is, twitter has some guidelines, you must follow otherwise, your account will be restricted. There is a limit for liking the number of tweets. If it gives some error, we can use tweepy.TweepError so that we know, what went wrong.

Here's my bot.

For full process, refer to my blog.

It's time to build your own bot. All the best.