Prerequisite
1. Twitter Account
2. Twitter App
3. Twitter API library
A Twitter account is required to create a Twitter App.
You cannot use Twitter API directly (using your username and password), so you have to create a Twitter App.
After you create your Twitter App, you get Consumer Key (API Key), Consumer Secret (API Secret), Access Token, Access Token Secret and you have to use them as credentials to communicate using Twitter API.
Additionally, you need a library for your programming language (PHP in my case) to easily use Twitter API. There are many libraries available. In this blog, I am using TwitterOAuth.
Unlike many Twitter API libraries, TwitterOAuth doesn’t provide a custom function for every API method. Instead, there are a couple of generic(e.g get, post, delete) functions so that as Twitter adds features to the API you don’t need to update the library. Here is an example of GET statuses/home_timeline.
1 2 3 | GET https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/home_timeline.json?count=25&exclude_replies=true |
1 2 3 | $statuses = $connection->get("statuses/home_timeline", ["count" => 25, "exclude_replies" => true]); |
How to create a Twitter App
1. To create a Twitter App click this link, https://dev.twitter.com/apps.
2. Press “Create New App” button.
3. Complete the “Create an application” form with right data and press “create your Twitter application” button.
4. Go to “Permission” TAB and set Type of Application to ‘Read and Write’. Then press “Update Settings” button.
5. Go to “keys and Access Tokens” TAB and press “Create my access token” button. This will generate your access token.
6. From “keys and Access Tokens” TAB, you can get your required credentials.
Implementation to post tweets in PHP
Follow the Abraham/TwitterOAuth document. So First, You need to install the library in your project. After completing the installation and import you can start coding.
1. Define your credentials into your project’s configuration file from where you can access them.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | define('CONSUMER_KEY','YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY'); define('CONSUMER_SECRET','YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET'); define('OAUTH_TOKEN','YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN'); define('OAUTH_SECRET','YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN_SECRET'); define('SCREEN_NAME','YOUR_PROJECT_NAME'); |
2. Create an object of TwitterOAuth class to access its functions.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | require("config.php"); require("vendor/autoload.php"); use Abraham\TwitterOAuth\TwitterOAuth; $connection = new TwitterOAuth(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, OAUTH_TOKEN, OAUTH_SECRET); $content = $connection->get("account/verify_credentials"); |
3. If you just want to tweet on your twitter account, make below API request once you verified your credentials.
1 2 3 | $statues = $connection->post("statuses/update", ["status" => "hello world"]); |
4. Similarly, check below code if you want to post an image.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 | require("config.php"); require("vendor/autoload.php"); use Abraham\TwitterOAuth\TwitterOAuth; $connection = new TwitterOAuth(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, OAUTH_TOKEN, OAUTH_SECRET); $media1 = $connection->upload('media/upload', ['media' => '/path/to/file/kitten1.jpg']); $media2 = $connection->upload('media/upload', ['media' => '/path/to/file/kitten2.jpg']); $parameters = [ 'status' => 'Hello Word with Images!', 'media_ids' => implode(',', [$media1->media_id_string, $media2->media_id_string]) ]; $result = $connection->post('statuses/update', $parameters); |
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Helpful!