Finally, Twitter released the academic track, a new API endpoint just for researchers! The application is already open, and I am one of the lucky guys with approved access.

However, it is relatively new and, therefore, it is not easy to find many tutorials or related materials online. I want to change this and start with a quick-start on loading historic tweets (incl. package suggestion and configuration). I highly recommend the python package TwitterAPI. It already provides support for the new authentication mechanism and all endpoints of the academic track.

  1. First of all, you have to install the package
pip install TwitterAPI
  1. Before we can query the API, we have to authenticate. If you don’t have created an application (app) yet, please create a new one first. You find your application’s API key as well as the secret in the Twitter developer portal (Projects & Apps -> your project -> your application; there is a tab named “Keys and tokens” directly below the application’s name). Such that the package uses the right authentication method, you have to set the auth_type to ‘oAuth2’. Besides, we are going to use the API version 2, which we provide as an argument.
from TwitterAPI import TwitterAPI

api_key = "<your key>"
api_secret_key = "<your secret>"

api = TwitterAPI(api_key, api_secret_key, auth_type='oAuth2', api_version='2')
  1. As soon as you expect many results, it is wise to use the TwitterPager, which loads all tweets batch-wise. Please take a look at the query builder documentation for more information about the topic. The argument max_results defines the batch-size, and 500 is the API’s maximal value. You can find additional API parameters in the documentation right here.
from TwitterAPI import TwitterPager

r = TwitterPager(api, 'tweets/search/all', {
    'query': 'your query', 
    'max_results': 500,
})


for item in r.get_iterator():
    # voila !
    print(item)