Getting Started¶

Getting your application tokens¶

This section is subject to changes made by Twitter and may not always be completely up-to-date. If you see something change on their end, please create a new issue on Github or submit a pull request to update it.

In order to use the python-twitter API client, you first need to acquire a set of application tokens. These will be your consumer_key and consumer_secret, which get passed to twitter.Api() when starting your application.

Create your app¶

The first step in doing so is to create a Twitter App. Click the “Create New App” button and fill out the fields on the next page.

_images/python-twitter-app-creation-part1.png

If there are any problems with the information on that page, Twitter will complain and you can fix it. (Make sure to get the name correct - it is unclear if you can change this later.) On the next screen, you’ll see the application that you created and some information about it:

Your app¶

Once your app is created, you’ll be directed to a new page showing you some information about it.

_images/python-twitter-app-creation-part2-new.png

Your Keys¶

Click on the “Keys and Access Tokens” tab on the top.

_images/python-twitter-app-creation-part3-new.png

Under the “Access token & access token secret” option, click on the “create” button to generate a new access token and token secret.

_images/python-twitter-app-creation-part3-1-new.png

At this point, you can test out your application using the keys under “Your Application Tokens”. The twitter.Api() object can be created as follows:

import twitter
api = twitter.Api(consumer_key=<consumer key>,
                  consumer_secret=<consumer secret>,
                  access_token_key=<access token>,
                  access_token_secret=<access token secret>)

Note: Make sure to enclose your keys in quotes (ie, api = twitter.Api(consumer_key=’1234567’, …) and so on) or you will receive a NameError.

If you are creating an application for end users/consumers, then you will want them to authorize your application, but that is outside the scope of this document.

And that should be it! If you need a little more help, check out the examples on Github. If you have an open source application using python-twitter, send us a link and we’ll add a link to it here.