node-twitter-api

node-twitter

Simple module for using Twitter's API in node.js

Installation

npm install node-twitter-api

Usage

Step 1: Initialization

var twitterAPI = require('node-twitter-api');
var twitter = new twitterAPI({
	consumerKey: 'your consumer Key',
	consumerSecret: 'your consumer secret',
	callback: 'http://yoururl.tld/something'
});

Step 2: Getting a request token

twitter.getRequestToken(function(error, requestToken, requestTokenSecret, results){
	if (error) {
		console.log("Error getting OAuth request token : " + error);
	} else {
		//store token and tokenSecret somewhere, you'll need them later; redirect user
	}
});

If no error has occured, you now have a requestToken and a requestTokenSecret. You should store them somewhere (e.g. in a session, if you are using express), because you will need them later to get the current user's access token, which is used for authentification.

Step 3: Getting an Access Token

Redirect the user to https://twitter.com/oauth/authenticate?oauth_token=[requestToken]. If he allows your app to access his data, Twitter will redirect him to your callback-URL (defined in Step 1) containing the get-parameters: oauth_token and oauth_verifier. You can use oauth_token (which is the requestToken in Step 2) to find the associated requestTokenSecret. You will need requestToken, requestTokenSecret and oauth_verifier to get an Access Token.

twitter.getAccessToken(requestToken, requestTokenSecret, oauth_verifier, function(error, accessToken, accessTokenSecret, results) {
	if (error) {
		console.log(error);
	} else {
		//store accessToken and accessTokenSecret somewhere (associated to the user)
		//Step 4: Verify Credentials belongs here
	}
});

If no error occured, you now have an accessToken and an accessTokenSecret. You need them to authenticate later API-calls.

Step 4: (Optional) Verify Credentials

twitter.verifyCredentials(accessToken, accessTokenSecret, function(error, data, response) {
	if (error) {
		//something was wrong with either accessToken or accessTokenSecret
		//start over with Step 1
	} else {
		//accessToken and accessTokenSecret can now be used to make api-calls (not yet implemented)
		//data contains the user-data described in the official Twitter-API-docs
		//you could e.g. display his screen_name
		console.log(data["screen_name"]);
	}
});

Methods

(Allmost) all function names replicate the endpoints of the Twitter API 1.1. If you want to post a status e. g. - which is done by posting data to statuses/update - you can just do the following:

twitter.statuses("update", {
		status: "Hello world!"
	},
	accessToken,
	accessTokenSecret,
	function(error, data, response) {
		if (error) {
			// something went wrong
		} else {
			// data contains the data sent by twitter
		}
	}
);

Most of the functions use the scheme: twitter.[namespace]([type], [params], [accessToken], [accessTokenSecret], [callback]);

• namespace is the word before the slash (e.g. "statuses", "search", "direct_messages" etc.)
• type is the word after the slash (e.g. "create", "update", "show" etc.)
• params is an object containing the parameters you want to give to twitter (refer to the Twitter API Documentation for more information)
• accessToken and accessTokenSecret are the token and secret of the authenticated user
• callback is a function with the parameters error (either null or an error object), data (data object) and response (unprocessed response from Twitter)

For Timelines you can also use the function getTimeline instead of statuses and use shorter types ("user" instead of "user_timeline"). For Streams you must use getStream which has two instead of just one callback: a dataCallback and an endCallback. (c.f. data and end events of node's http response)

Use of update_with_media

(works similar for update_profile_image) To send media alongside a tweet you just call the method as specified before. Please note, that you have to specify the parameters slightly different than proposed by the Twitter API documentation:

{
	media: [
		"path_to_file1",
		"path_to_file2",
		stream
	],
	status: "Hello World"
},

Instead of specifing "media[]", you use a real array. The given paths will then be read and posted to the Twitter API. You can also use a Readable Stream (http://nodejs.org/api/fs.html#fs_fs_createreadstream_path_options) instead of a Path. Please note that Twitter only allows one image at the moment (the last one specified will be used).