rtweet setup tutorial

Step One: Create Twitter Account

Make a Twitter account

• https://twitter.com/login?lang=en

Step Two: Apply for Dev Account

You must apply for a Twitter dev account. Unfortunately (fortunately?), actual human beings over at Twitter HQ review access requests for developer API keys. Long story short, they need to make sure you're not a bot.

Acceptance might take hours-days. Check email frequently.

• https://developer.twitter.com/en/apply-for-access
  • You will be prompted to specify who you are and what you will be using your Twitter dev account for.
  • The application requires detailed information regarding the purposes of the app.

Step Three: Set up app

Assuming you have heard back and your Twitter developer account has been accepted, you can now access your Twitter Dev. account. You must now create a new App on Twitter. Open the dropdown menu next to your profile name, and click on Apps. Then click on the button that says Create an app. The app requires several entries:

• App name: Choose a name for your app. Ideally, this should be all letters and numbers with no spaces.
• Application Description: Add a description for your application (between 10 and 200 characters). This will be visible to others.
• Website URL: If you do not have a website to host data attribution, enter a “placeholder” url, or the URL to your twitter profile.
• Callback URLs: This is IMPORTANT. Type this “http://127.0.0.1:1410” into the field. This is the universal loopback address, which ensures that callbacks go back to the localhost on port 1410.
• Tell us how this app will be used: Write a description about how this app will work (minimum of 100 characters)

It is also important to make sure you Enable Sign in with Twitter.

• you can always go back and edit the app to Enable Sign in with Twitter.

Once finished, click the Create button.

You have now successfully created your app

Step Four: Set up environment

Open the drop down menu by your profile name again, but this time, click dev environments. Because we want to access the full archive of Tweets, we will be using the Full Archive/Sandbox environment. Click the button to set up that environment (this should be the one in the middle).

In the pop-up menu, type in a label for the environment (this should be different from the name of your app) and select your app that you created in step 3 before clicking Complete Setup.
You have now successfully set up your environment

Step Five: Get API Key

Go to your Twitter Developer account, navigate to your Apps page, and click on the Details button next to your app. Then, click on the Keys and tokens tab. This shows you your API key and your API secret key. Copy and paste these values into your R script file.

store api keys (these are fake example values; replace with your own keys)

api_key <- "afYS4vbIlPAj096E60c4W1fiK"
api_secret_key <- "bI91kqnqFoNCrZFbsjAWHD4gJ91LQAhdCJXCj3yscfuULtNkuu"

Step Six: Generate Tokens

Now we need to generate access tokens. To do this, we use the same page we got the api keys from. Go down to where it says Access token and access token secret and click Generate. A window will pop up with these keys. Copy these keys into the same R script file, so now we have this…

##(these are fake example values; replace with your own keys)

api_key <- "afYS4vbIlPAj096E60c4W1fiK"
api_secret_key <- "bI91kqnqFoNCrZFbsjAWHD4gJ91LQAhdCJXCj3yscfuULtNkuu"
access_token <- "YS4vbIlPAj096YS4vbIlPAj096"
access_token_secret <- "YS4YS4vbIlPYS4vbIlPAj096Aj096vbIlPAj096"

IMPORTANT: Do not store these keys anywhere in your code that you upload to Github or anywhere else online. Use them to generate your token, and then store them in a separate file that is ignored by the .gitignore file, or save them as environment variables in the ~/.Renviron folder (can be edited using file.edit(“~/.Renviron”))

Step Seven: Store tokens

Now we need to create a token so that we can access the api. We do this with the create_token() function.

## authenticate via web browser
twitter.token <- create_token(
  app = "APPNAME", ## the name of your app
  consumer_key = api_key,
  consumer_secret = api_secret_key,
  access_token = access_token,
  access_secret = access_token_secret
  )

This function automatically saves the token in your environment. You can then use the function get_token() to access your token in future R sessions (on the same machine). Just make sure to view your token to make sure the api keys match.

get_token()

Once the token is in your environment, you can start searching for tweets using the rtweet package.