README.md

Introduction

Given a search string, this returns a random tweet found by Twitter's search API. See here: https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/search for more details on searching.

Set up

This project is in python 3, so when creating your virtualenv remember to specify

virtualenv my_dir  -p python3
cd my_dir
source bin/activate

After you pull this repo, install dependencies via

pip install -r requirements.txt

Next, you need to set your Twitter API credentials as environment variables

# Obviously, replacing empty strings with your own keys
export TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY=''
export TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY_SECRET=''
export TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN=''
export TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=''

It might be helpful to put these in your bin/activate script.

Running

Simply:

python twitter_search.py

You'll see the following prompt:

Please input any string to search on twitter: 

As per above, any string can be used to search. Expected output is as such:

Please input any string to search on twitter: "@oprah ur caps r on, btw"
@stylesandfranta
RT @SHAQ: @oprah ur caps r on, btw

If no tweets found, you will simply see "No matching tweets found."