twarc

Translations: Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish

twarc is a command line tool and Python library for archiving Twitter JSON data. Each tweet is represented as a JSON object that is exactly what was returned from the Twitter API. Tweets are stored as line-oriented JSON. Twarc will handle Twitter API's rate limits for you. In addition to letting you collect tweets Twarc can also help you collect users, trends and hydrate tweet ids.

twarc was developed as part of the Documenting the Now project which was funded by the Mellon Foundation.

Install

Before using twarc you will need to register an application at apps.twitter.com. Once you've created your application, note down the consumer key, consumer secret and then click to generate an access token and access token secret. With these four variables in hand you are ready to start using twarc.

1. install Python (2 or 3)
2. pip install twarc

Homebrew (macOS only)

For macOS users, you can install twarc via:

$ brew install twarc

Quickstart:

First you're going to need to tell twarc about your application API keys and grant access to one or more Twitter accounts:

twarc configure

Then try out a search:

twarc search blacklivesmatter > search.jsonl

Or maybe you'd like to collect tweets as they happen?

twarc filter blacklivesmatter > stream.jsonl

See below for the details about these commands and more.

Usage

Configure

Once you've got your application keys you can tell twarc what they are with the configure command.

twarc configure

This will store your credentials in a file called .twarc in your home directory so you don't have to keep entering them in. If you would rather supply them directly you can set them in the environment (CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, ACCESS_TOKEN, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET) or using command line options (--consumer_key, --consumer_secret, --access_token, --access_token_secret).

Search

This uses Twitter's search/tweets to download pre-existing tweets matching a given query.

twarc search blacklivesmatter > tweets.jsonl

It's important to note that search will return tweets that are found within a 7 day window that Twitter's search API imposes. If this seems like a small window, it is, but you may be interested in collecting tweets as they happen using the filter and sample commands below.

The best way to get familiar with Twitter's search syntax is to experiment with Twitter's Advanced Search and copy and pasting the resulting query from the search box. For example here is a more complicated query that searches for tweets containing either the #blacklivesmatter or #blm hashtags that were sent to deray.

twarc search '#blacklivesmatter OR #blm to:deray' > tweets.jsonl

You also should definitely check out Igor Brigadir's excellent reference guide to the Twitter Search syntax: Advanced Search on Twitter. There are lots of hidden gems in there that the advanced search form doesn't make readily apparent.

Twitter attempts to code the language of a tweet, and you can limit your search to a particular language if you want using an ISO 639-1 code:

twarc search '#blacklivesmatter' --lang fr > tweets.jsonl

You can also search for tweets with a given location, for example tweets mentioning blacklivesmatter that are 1 mile from the center of Ferguson, Missouri:

twarc search blacklivesmatter --geocode 38.7442,-90.3054,1mi > tweets.jsonl

If a search query isn't supplied when using --geocode you will get all tweets relevant for that location and radius:

twarc search --geocode 38.7442,-90.3054,1mi > tweets.jsonl

Filter

The filter command will use Twitter's statuses/filter API to collect tweets as they happen.

twarc filter blacklivesmatter,blm > tweets.jsonl

Please note that the syntax for the Twitter's track queries is slightly different than what queries in their search API. So please consult the documentation on how best to express the filter option you are using.

Use the follow command line argument if you would like to collect tweets from a given user id as they happen. This includes retweets. For example this will collect tweets and retweets from CNN:

twarc filter --follow 759251 > tweets.jsonl

You can also collect tweets using a bounding box. Note: the leading dash needs to be escaped in the bounding box or else it will be interpreted as a command line argument!

twarc filter --locations "\-74,40,-73,41" > tweets.jsonl

User can use the lang command line argument to pass in a ISO 639-1 language code to limit to, and since the filter stream allow you to filter by one more languages it is repeatable. So this would collect tweets that mention paris or madrid that were made in French or Spanish:

twarc filter paris,madrid --lang fr --lang es

If you combine filter and follow options they are OR'ed together. For example this will collect tweets that use the blacklivesmatter or blm hashtags and also tweets from user CNN:

twarc filter blacklivesmatter,blm --follow 759251 > tweets.jsonl

But combining locations and languages will result effectively in an AND. For example this will collect tweets from the greater New York area that are in Spanish or French:

twarc filter --locations "\-74,40,-73,41" --lang es --lang fr

Sample

Use the sample command to listen to Twitter's statuses/sample API for a "random" sample of recent public statuses.

twarc sample > tweets.jsonl

Dehydrate

The dehydrate command generates an id list from a file of tweets:

twarc dehydrate tweets.jsonl > tweet-ids.txt

Hydrate

Twarc's hydrate command will read a file of tweet identifiers and write out the tweet JSON for them using Twitter's status/lookup API.

twarc hydrate ids.txt > tweets.jsonl

Twitter API's Terms of Service discourage people from making large amounts of raw Twitter data available on the Web. The data can be used for research and archived for local use, but not shared with the world. Twitter does allow files of tweet identifiers to be shared, which can be useful when you would like to make a dataset of tweets available. You can then use Twitter's API to hydrate the data, or to retrieve the full JSON for each identifier. This is particularly important for verification of social media research.

Users

The users command will return User metadata for the given screen names.

twarc users deray,Nettaaaaaaaa > users.jsonl

You can also give it user ids:

twarc users 1232134,1413213 > users.jsonl

If you want you can also use a file of user ids, which can be useful if you are using the followers and friends commands below:

twarc users ids.txt > users.jsonl

Followers

The followers command will use Twitter's follower id API to collect the follower user ids for exactly one user screen name per request as specified as an argument:

twarc followers deray > follower_ids.txt

The result will include exactly one user id per line. The response order is reverse chronological, or most recent followers first.

Friends

Like the followers command, the friends command will use Twitter's friend id API to collect the friend user ids for exactly one user screen name per request as specified as an argument:

twarc friends deray > friend_ids.txt

Trends

The trends command lets you retrieve information from Twitter's API about trending hashtags. You need to supply a Where On Earth identifier (woeid) to indicate what trends you are interested in. For example here's how you can get the current trends for St Louis:

twarc trends 2486982

Using a woeid of 1 will return trends for the entire planet:

twarc trends 1

If you aren't sure what to use as a woeid just omit it and you will get a list of all the places for which Twitter tracks trends:

twarc trends

If you have a geo-location you can use it instead of the woedid.

twarc trends 39.9062,-79.4679

Behind the scenes twarc will lookup the location using Twitter's trends/closest API to find the nearest woeid.

Timeline

The timeline command will use Twitter's user timeline API to collect the most recent tweets posted by the user indicated by screen_name.

twarc timeline deray > tweets.jsonl

You can also look up users using a user id:

twarc timeline 12345 > tweets.jsonl

Retweets

You can get retweets for a given tweet id like so:

twarc retweets 824077910927691778 > retweets.jsonl

Replies

Unfortunately Twitter's API does not currently support getting replies to a tweet. So twarc approximates it by using the search API. Since the search API does not support getting tweets older than a week twarc can only get all the replies to a tweet that have been sent in the last week.

If you want to get the replies to a given tweet you can:

twarc replies 824077910927691778 > replies.jsonl

Using the --recursive option will also fetch replies to the replies as well as quotes. This can take a long time to complete for a large thread because of rate limiting by the search API.

twarc replies 824077910927691778 --recursive

Lists

To get the users that are on a list you can use the list URL with the listmembers command:

twarc listmembers https://twitter.com/edsu/lists/bots

Premium Search API

Twitter introduced Premium Search API that let you pay Twitter money for tweets. Once you have set up an environment in your dashboard you can use their 30day and fullarchive endpoints to search for tweets outside the 7 day window provided by the Standard Search API. To use the premium API from the command line you will need to indicate which endpoint you are using, and the environment.

To avoid using up your entire budget you will likely want to limit to some time range using --to_date and --from_date. Additionally you can limit the maximum number of tweets returned using --limit.

So for example if I wanted to get all the blacklivesmatter tweets from a two weeks ago (assuming today is June 1, 2020) using my environment named docnowndev but not retrieving more than 1000 tweets I could:

twarc search blacklivesmatter \
  --30day docnowdev \
  --from_date 2020-05-01 \
  --to_date 2020-05-14 \
  --limit 1000 \
  > tweets.jsonl

Similarly to find tweets from 2014 using the full archive you can:

twarc search blacklivesmatter \
  --fullarchive docnowdev \
  --from_date 2014-08-04 \
  --to_date 2014-08-05 \
  --limit 1000 \
  > tweets.jsonl

If your environment is sandboxed you will need to use --sandbox so that twarc knows not to request more than 100 tweets at a time (the default for non-sandboxed environments is 500)

twarc search blacklivesmatter \
  --fullarchive docnowdev \
  --from_date 2014-08-04 \
  --to_date 2014-08-05 \
  --limit 1000 \
  --sandbox \
  > tweets.jsonl

Use as a Library

If you want you can use twarc programmatically as a library to collect tweets. You first need to create a Twarc instance (using your Twitter credentials), and then use it to iterate through search results, filter results or lookup results.

from twarc import Twarc

t = Twarc(consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token, access_token_secret)
for tweet in t.search("ferguson"):
    print(tweet["text"])

You can do the same for a filter stream of new tweets that match a track keyword

for tweet in t.filter(track="ferguson"):
    print(tweet["text"])

or location:

for tweet in t.filter(locations="-74,40,-73,41"):
    print(tweet["text"])

or user ids:

for tweet in t.filter(follow='12345,678910'):
    print(tweet["text"])

Similarly you can hydrate tweet identifiers by passing in a list of ids or a generator:

for tweet in t.hydrate(open('ids.txt')):
    print(tweet["text"])

User vs App Auth

Twarc will manage handling rate limiting by Twitter. But you should know that their rate limiting varies based on the way that you authenticate. The two options are User Auth and App Auth. Twarc defaults to using User Auth but you can tell it to use App Auth.

Switching to App Auth can be handy in some situations like when you are searching tweets, since User Auth can only issue 180 requests every 15 minutes (1.6 million tweets per day, but App Auth can issue 450 (4.3 million tweets per day).

But be careful, the statuses/lookup endpoint used by the hydrate subcommand has a rate limit of 900 requests per 15 minutes for User Auth, and 300 request per 15 minutes for App Auth.

If you know what you are doing and want to force App Auth you can use the --app_auth command line option:

twarc --app_auth search ferguson > tweets.jsonl

Similarly if you are using Twarc as a library you can:

from twarc import Twarc

t = Twarc(app_auth=True)
for tweet in t.search('ferguson'):
    print(tweet['id_str'])

Utilities

In the utils directory there are some simple command line utilities for working with the line-oriented JSON, like printing out the archived tweets as text or html, extracting the usernames, referenced URLs, etc. If you create a script that you find handy please send a pull request.

When you've got some tweets you can create a rudimentary wall of them:

utils/wall.py tweets.jsonl > tweets.html

You can create a word cloud of tweets you collected about nasa:

utils/wordcloud.py tweets.jsonl > wordcloud.html

If you've collected some tweets using replies you can create a static D3 visualization of them with:

utils/network.py tweets.jsonl tweets.html

Optionally you can consolidate tweets by user, allowing you to see central accounts:

utils/network.py --users tweets.jsonl tweets.html

And if you want to use the network graph in a program like Gephi, you can generate a GEXF file with the following:

utils/network.py --users tweets.jsonl tweets.gexf

gender.py is a filter which allows you to filter tweets based on a guess about the gender of the author. So for example you can filter out all the tweets that look like they were from women, and create a word cloud for them:

utils/gender.py --gender female tweets.jsonl | utils/wordcloud.py >
tweets-female.html

You can output GeoJSON from tweets where geo coordinates are available:

utils/geojson.py tweets.jsonl > tweets.geojson

Optionally you can export GeoJSON with centroids replacing bounding boxes:

utils/geojson.py tweets.jsonl --centroid > tweets.geojson

And if you do export GeoJSON with centroids, you can add some random fuzzing:

utils/geojson.py tweets.jsonl --centroid --fuzz 0.01 > tweets.geojson

To filter tweets by presence or absence of geo coordinates (or Place, see API documentation):

utils/geofilter.py tweets.jsonl --yes-coordinates > tweets-with-geocoords.jsonl
cat tweets.jsonl | utils/geofilter.py --no-place > tweets-with-no-place.jsonl

To filter tweets by a GeoJSON fence (requires Shapely):

utils/geofilter.py tweets.jsonl --fence limits.geojson > fenced-tweets.jsonl
cat tweets.jsonl | utils/geofilter.py --fence limits.geojson > fenced-tweets.jsonl

If you suspect you have duplicate in your tweets you can dedupe them:

utils/deduplicate.py tweets.jsonl > deduped.jsonl

You can sort by ID, which is analogous to sorting by time:

utils/sort_by_id.py tweets.jsonl > sorted.jsonl

You can filter out all tweets before a certain date (for example, if a hashtag was used for another event before the one you're interested in):

utils/filter_date.py --mindate 1-may-2014 tweets.jsonl > filtered.jsonl

You can get an HTML list of the clients used:

utils/source.py tweets.jsonl > sources.html

If you want to remove the retweets:

utils/noretweets.py tweets.jsonl > tweets_noretweets.jsonl

Or unshorten urls (requires unshrtn):

cat tweets.jsonl | utils/unshrtn.py > unshortened.jsonl

Once you unshorten your URLs you can get a ranked list of most-tweeted URLs:

cat unshortened.jsonl | utils/urls.py | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr > urls.txt

twarc-report

Some further utility scripts to generate csv or json output suitable for use with D3.js visualizations are found in the twarc-report project. The util directed.py, formerly part of twarc, has moved to twarc-report as d3graph.py.

Each script can also generate an html demo of a D3 visualization, e.g. timelines or a directed graph of retweets.