Introduction

TweetScraper can get tweets from Twitter Search. It is built on Scrapy without using Twitter's APIs. The crawled data is not as clean as the one obtained by the APIs, but the benefits are you can get rid of the API's rate limits and restrictions. Ideally, you can get all the data from Twitter Search.

WARNING: please be polite and follow the crawler's politeness policy.

Installation

It requires Scrapy and PyMongo (Also install MongoDB if you want to save the data to database). Setting up:

$ git clone https://github.com/jonbakerfish/TweetScraper.git
$ cd TweetScraper/
$ pip install -r requirements.txt  #add '--user' if you are not root
$ scrapy list
$ #If the output is 'TweetScraper', then you are ready to go.

Usage

1. Change the USER_AGENT in TweetScraper/settings.py to identify who you are

    USER_AGENT = 'your website/e-mail'
   

2. In the root folder of this project, run command like:

    scrapy crawl TweetScraper -a query="foo,#bar"
   

   where query is a list of keywords seperated by comma and quoted by ". The query can be any thing (keyword, hashtag, etc.) you want to search in Twitter Search. TweetScraper will crawl the search results of the query and save the tweet content and user information. You can also use the following operators in each query (from Twitter Search):

   Operator	Finds tweets...
   twitter search	containing both "twitter" and "search". This is the default operator.
   " happy hour "	containing the exact phrase "happy hour".
   love OR hate	containing either "love" or "hate" (or both).
   beer - root	containing "beer" but not "root".
   # haiku	containing the hashtag "haiku".
   from: alexiskold	sent from person "alexiskold".
   to: techcrunch	sent to person "techcrunch".
   @ mashable	referencing person "mashable".
   "happy hour" near: "san francisco"	containing the exact phrase "happy hour" and sent near "san francisco".
   near: NYC within: 15mi	sent within 15 miles of "NYC".
   superhero since: 2010-12-27	containing "superhero" and sent since date "2010-12-27" (year-month-day).
   ftw until: 2010-12-27	containing "ftw" and sent up to date "2010-12-27".
   movie -scary :)	containing "movie", but not "scary", and with a positive attitude.
   flight :(	containing "flight" and with a negative attitude.
   traffic ?	containing "traffic" and asking a question.
   hilarious filter:links	containing "hilarious" and linking to URLs.
   news source:twitterfeed	containing "news" and entered via TwitterFeed

3. The tweets will be saved to disk in ./Data/tweet/ in default settings and ./Data/user/ is for user data. The file format is JSON. Change the SAVE_TWEET_PATH and SAVE_USER_PATH in TweetScraper/settings.py if you want another location.

4. In you want to save the data to MongoDB, change the ITEM_PIPELINES in TweetScraper/settings.py from TweetScraper.pipelines.SaveToFilePipeline to TweetScraper.pipelines.SaveToMongoPipeline.

Other parameters

• lang[DEFAULT=''] allow to choose the language of tweet scrapped. This is not part of the query parameters, it is a different part in the search API URL
• top_tweet[DEFAULT=False], if you want to query only top_tweets or all of them
• crawl_user[DEFAULT=False], if you want to crawl users, author's of tweets in the same time

E.g.: scrapy crawl TweetScraper -a query=foo -a crawl_user=True

Acknowledgement

Keeping the crawler up to date requires continuous efforts, we thank all the contributors for their valuable work.

License

TweetScraper is released under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 2