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:

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 any track=whatever or locations=-18,14,68,44 etc. A querystring-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).

0. tweet_id
1. created_at parsed into YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS, implicitly UTC
2. text, newlines and tabs converted to spaces, html entities replaced, t.co urls resolved
3. lon,lat
4. place_id
5. place_str
6. in_reply_to_status_id
7. in_reply_to_screen_name
8. retweet_id id of the original tweet
9. retweet_count
10. user.screen_name
11. user.id
12. user.created_at parsed into YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS
13. user.name
14. user.description
15. user.location
16. user.url
17. user.statuses_count
18. user.followers_count
19. user.friends_count
20. user.favourites_count
21. user.geo_enabled
22. user.default_profile
23. user.time_zone
24. user.lang
25. 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.