whsheng / tweetscraper

TweetScraper is a simple crawler/spider for Twitter Search without using API

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

1. Install conda, you can get it from miniconda. The tested python version is 3.7.

2. Install selenium python bindings: https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/installation.html. (Note: the KeyError: 'driver' is caused by wrong setup)

3. For ubuntu or debian user, run:

   $ bash install.sh
   $ conda activate tweetscraper
   $ scrapy list
   $ #If the output is 'TweetScraper', then you are ready to go.
   

   the install.sh will create a new environment tweetscraper and install all the dependencies (e.g., firefox-geckodriver and firefox),

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.

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.

Acknowledgement

Keeping the crawler up to date requires continuous efforts, please support our work via opencollective.com/tweetscraper.

License

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