by Lucas Kohorst

Create a Twitter Bot in Python Using Tweepy

With about 15% of Twitter being composed of bots, I wanted to try my hand at it. I googled how to create a Twitter bot and was brought to a cleanly laid out web app. It allowed you to create a bot that would like, follow, or retweet a tweet based on a keyword. The problem was that you could only create one bot for one function.

So I decided to code a bot myself with Python and the Tweepy library.

Setup

First, I downloaded Tweepy. You can do this using the pip package manager.

pip install tweepy

You can also clone the GitHub repository if you do not have pip installed.

git clone https://github.com/tweepy/tweepy.gitcd tweepypython setup.py install

You’ll need to import Tweepy and Tkinter (for the GUI interface).

import tweepyimport Tkinter

Credentials

Next, we need to link our Twitter account to our Python script. Go to apps.twitter.com and sign in with your account. Create a Twitter application and generate a Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token, and Access Token Secret. Now you are ready to begin!

Under your import statements store your credentials within variables and then use the second block of code to authenticate your account with tweepy.

consumer_key = 'consumer key'consumer_secret = 'consumer secrets'access_token = 'access token'access_token_secret = 'access token secret'

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)api = tweepy.API(auth)

In order to check if your program is working you could add:

user = api.me()print (user.name)

This should return the name of your Twitter account in the console.

Building the Bot

This bot is meant to:

Follow everyone following you. Favorite and Retweet a Tweet based on keywords. Reply to a user based on a keyword.

Step one is the easiest, you simply loop through your followers and then follow each one.

for follower in tweepy.Cursor(api.followers).items(): follower.follow() print ("Followed everyone that is following " + user.name)

At this point in order to make sure your code is working you should log onto Twitter and watch as the people you’re following increase.

From this point onwards, besides setting up and packing the labels in the GUI, I am coding everything under the function mainFunction() .

def mainFunction(): #The code

You might be able to see where this is going. In order to favorite or retweet a tweet we can use a for loop and a try statement like this:

search = "Keyword"

numberOfTweets = "Number of tweets you wish to interact with"

for tweet in tweepy.Cursor(api.search, search).items(numberOfTweets): try: tweet.retweet() print('Retweeted the tweet')

except tweepy.TweepError as e: print(e.reason)

except StopIteration: break

In order to favorite a tweet you can simply replace the

tweet.retweet()

with

tweet.favorite()

In order to reply to a user based on a keyword, we need to store the users username and twitter ID.

tweetId = tweet.user.idusername = tweet.user.screen_name

We can then loop through the tweets and update our status (tweet) at each user.

phrase = "What you would like your response tweet to say"

for tweet in tweepy.Cursor(api.search, search).items(numberOfTweets): try: tweetId = tweet.user.id username = tweet.user.screen_name api.update_status("@" + username + " " + phrase, in_reply_to_status_id = tweetId) print ("Replied with " + phrase) except tweepy.TweepError as e: print(e.reason)

except StopIteration: break

If you want to only utilize the script through the terminal and update the code every time you wish to run it then you have completed your bot.

Creating the GUI

We can create a GUI application that will take our inputs of the keyword you would like to search for and whether or not you would like to favorite a tweet.

We first need to initialize Tkinter and setup the layout.

To create our user interface, we are going to have seven labels for search, number of tweets, and reply. Plus the questions do you want to reply, favorite, retweet the tweet, and follow the user.

Remember the code below is outside and above our mainFunction() .

root = Tk()

label1 = Label( root, text="Search")E1 = Entry(root, bd =5)

label2 = Label( root, text="Number of Tweets")E2 = Entry(root, bd =5)

label3 = Label( root, text="Response")E3 = Entry(root, bd =5)

label4 = Label( root, text="Reply?")E4 = Entry(root, bd =5)

label5 = Label( root, text="Retweet?")E5 = Entry(root, bd =5)

label6 = Label( root, text="Favorite?")E6 = Entry(root, bd =5)

label7 = Label( root, text="Follow?")E7 = Entry(root, bd =5)

We also need to pack each label so that they show up and then call the root function in a loop so that it remains on the screen and doesn’t immediately close.

The following is what packing the first label looks like. I packed all of the labels below the mainFunction() .

label1.pack()E1.pack()

root.mainloop()

If you only ran your GUI code, it should look something like this:

However, inputing text into the labels or clicking the submit button will do nothing at this point. As the interface is not yet connected to the code.

In order to store the user input in the labels, we need to use the .get() function. I used individual functions for each label.

def getE1(): return E1.get()

Then in my mainFunction() , I called the function getE1() and stored the input into a variable. For E1 it looks like this:

getE1()search = getE1()

You must do this for every label. For the numberOfTweets label make sure to convert the input into an integer.

getE2()numberOfTweets = getE2()numberOfTweets = int(numberOfTweets)

For the last four labels (Reply, Favorite, Retweet and Follow), we need to check to see if the input from the user is “yes” or “no” in order to run that given function or not. This can be accomplished through if statements.

This would be the code for the reply function:

if reply == "yes":

for tweet in tweepy.Cursor(api.search, search).items(numberOfTweets): try: tweetId = tweet.user.id username = tweet.user.screen_name api.update_status("@" + username + " " + phrase, in_reply_to_status_id = tweetId) print ("Replied with " + phrase) except tweepy.TweepError as e: print(e.reason)

except StopIteration: break

For the favorite, retweet and follow functions simply replace the reply with “retweet”, “favorite” and “follow”. Then copy and paste the code you wrote above for each one underneath the if statement.

Now we just need to add the submit button and tell it to call the mainFunction() and execute the code for our Twitter Bot. Again, don’t forget to pack it!

submit = Button(root, text ="Submit", command = mainFunction)

That’s it! After you run your bot script, a GUI application should run and you will be able to reply, retweet, favorite and follow users.

With this Twitter Bot, I have created the account FreeWtr which advocates for use of filtered tap water over bottled water. Here is a screenshot of the profile.

Here is the full source code on Github.