Twitter Scraper

Twitter makes it hard to get all of a user's tweets (assuming they have more than 3200). This is a way to get around that using Python, Selenium, and Tweepy.

Essentially, we will use Selenium to open up a browser and automatically visit Twitter's search page, searching for a single user's tweets on a single day. If we want all tweets from 2015, we will check all 365 days / pages. This would be a nightmare to do manually, so the scrape.py script does it all for you - all you have to do is input a date range and a twitter user handle, and wait for it to finish.

The scrape.py script collects tweet ids. If you know a tweet's id number, you can get all the information available about that tweet using Tweepy - text, timestamp, number of retweets / replies / favorites, geolocation, etc. Tweepy uses Twitter's API, so you will need to get API keys. Once you have them, you can run the get_metadata.py script.

Requirements

• basic knowledge on how to use a terminal
• Safari 10+ with 'Allow Remote Automation' option enabled in Safari's Develop menu to control Safari via WebDriver.
• python3
  • to check, in your terminal, enter python3
  • if you don't have it, check YouTube for installation instructions
• pip or pip3
  • to check, in your terminal, enter pip or pip3
  • if you don't have it, again, check YouTube for installation instructions
• selenium (3.0.1)
  • pip3 install selenium
• tweepy (3.5.0)
  • pip3 install tweepy

Running the scraper

• open up scrape.py and edit the user, start, and end variables (and save the file)
• run python3 scrape.py
• you'll see a browser pop up and output in the terminal
• do some fun other task until it finishes
• once it's done, it outputs all the tweet ids it found into all_ids.json
• every time you run the scraper with different dates, it will add the new ids to the same file
  • it automatically removes duplicates so don't worry about small date overlaps

Troubleshooting the scraper

• do you get a no such file error? you need to cd to the directory of scrape.py
• do you get a driver error when you try and run the script?
  • open scrape.py and change the driver to use Chrome() or Firefox()
    • if neither work, google the error (you probably need to install a new driver)
• does it seem like it's not collecting tweets for days that have tweets?
  • open scrape.py and change the delay variable to 2 or 3

Getting the metadata

• first you'll need to get twitter API keys
  • sign up for a developer account here https://dev.twitter.com/
  • get your keys here: https://apps.twitter.com/
• put your keys into the sample_api_keys.json file
• change the name of sample_api_keys.json to api_keys.json
• open up get_metadata.py and edit the user variable (and save the file)
• run python3 get_metadata.py
• this will get metadata for every tweet id in all_ids.json
• it will create 4 files
  • username.json (master file with all metadata)
  • username.zip (a zipped file of the master file with all metadata)
  • username_short.json (smaller master file with relevant metadata fields)
  • username.csv (csv version of the smaller master file)