How to Create Twitter Bot using OAuth

Twitter has announced to shut down the Basic Authentication API on August 31st and recommend Twitter application developers to migrate their apps to OAuth Authentication. What about bots? That’s the same. If you have bot created using Basic Authentication, then you should migrate your bot to OAuth. Here’s how, but first..

What is OAuth?

OAuth is a new authentication method that doesn’t use plain username & password to authenticate. OAuth uses a pair of tokens to check your credentials, therefore you don’t need to worry about leaking your password. These tokens are unique per user and per application. For further info about OAuth, check http://oauth.net/

So how?

First thing you need to do after creating bot account is creating an application. Go to http://dev.twitter.com/apps/new with your bot account and fill the form.

– Name: the application name will be shown after “via” in your tweets
– Application Type: You must choose ‘Browser’
– Default Access Type: Choose ‘Read and Write’
– Everything else you can fill any value

After created, go to you application detail. There you can see ‘Consumer Key’ and ‘Consumer Secret’ value. Save these keys.

Then click ‘My Access Token’ button in the right. You will see your ‘Access Token’ and ‘Access Token Secret’. You should save these keys too.

And now let’s go to the code!

You’ll need some libraries to utilize OAuth functions, so download Abraham’s TwitterOAuth library first. Copy the OAuth.php & twitteroauth.php files from downloaded library to your server, and create a new PHP file in the same directory.

And here’s the code:
this is the code I use for my bot @juru_doa 😉

require_once('twitteroauth.php');

define('CONSUMER_KEY', 'insert_your_consumer_key_here');
define('CONSUMER_SECRET', 'insert_your_consumer_secret_here');
define('ACCESS_TOKEN', 'insert_your_access_token_here');
define('ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET', 'insert_your_access_token_secret_here');

$twitter = new TwitterOAuth(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, ACCESS_TOKEN, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET);
$twitter->host = "http://search.twitter.com/";
$search = $twitter->get('search', array('q' => 'semoga', 'rpp' => 20));

$twitter->host = "https://api.twitter.com/1/";
foreach($search->results as $tweet) {
	$status = 'Amiiiin RT @'.$tweet->from_user.' '.$tweet->text;
	if(strlen($status) > 140) $status = substr($status, 0, 139);
	$twitter->post('statuses/update', array('status' => $status));
}

What above code does?
After authenticating the OAuth tokens, it will do a search for ‘semoga’ keyword and grab the 20 most recent tweets. You can set another keyword for your bot. Then it will ReTweet each tweets and and ‘Amiiin’ before it.

To try whether you bot works or not, you can access your script from a browser. If the displays blank page, then your script might be work. Go check the timeline to make sure.

The last step is creating a cron job to run your script in certain times. How? That part is what you should do yourself 😆

Tips: Don’t run your bot too often, like in every minutes, and don’t tweet too much, since there are limitation from Twitter.

Discuss about Twitter Bot here