Building Twitter Bots with Python

Automating Tweets and Interactions

Photo by Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash

With millions of active users sending billions of messages, Twitter presents an enormous platform for sharing ideas and connecting communities. But manually composing tweets grows tiring over time.

Luckily Python offers accessible libraries for building Twitter bots that post, favorite, retweet and follow accounts automatically. These programmatic interactions open creative avenues for art, humor and social commentary.

Let’s code up some examples to appreciate Python’s possibilities for automation and bot creation on this microblogging network!

Authenticating with Twitter’s API

To access Twitter programmatically, we utilize their REST API allowing app integration once registering as a developer.

Python’s tweepy library handles this authentication flow:

import tweepy
CONSUMER_KEY = 'XXXX' 
CONSUMER_SECRET = 'XXXX'
access_token = "XXXX" 
access_token_secret = "XXXX"
 
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)
 
api = tweepy.API(auth)

By linking unique consumer and access keys to accounts, we gain API access for posting, scraping and more.