What is twitter-api-v2?
The twitter-api-v2 npm package is a comprehensive library for interacting with the Twitter API v2. It allows developers to perform a wide range of actions such as posting tweets, retrieving user information, managing direct messages, and more. The package is designed to be easy to use and supports both REST and streaming APIs.
What are twitter-api-v2's main functionalities?
Posting a Tweet
This feature allows you to post a tweet to your Twitter account. The code sample demonstrates how to initialize the TwitterApi client with an access token and post a tweet saying 'Hello, world!'.
const { TwitterApi } = require('twitter-api-v2');
const client = new TwitterApi('YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN');
async function postTweet() {
const tweet = await client.v2.tweet('Hello, world!');
console.log(tweet);
}
postTweet();
Fetching User Information
This feature allows you to fetch information about a specific Twitter user by their username. The code sample shows how to retrieve and log the user information for the 'TwitterDev' account.
const { TwitterApi } = require('twitter-api-v2');
const client = new TwitterApi('YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN');
async function getUserInfo() {
const user = await client.v2.userByUsername('TwitterDev');
console.log(user);
}
getUserInfo();
Streaming Tweets
This feature allows you to stream tweets in real-time based on certain criteria. The code sample demonstrates how to set up a stream to listen for tweets and log the tweet data as it comes in.
const { TwitterApi } = require('twitter-api-v2');
const client = new TwitterApi('YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN');
async function streamTweets() {
const stream = await client.v2.searchStream({ 'tweet.fields': ['author_id'] });
for await (const { data } of stream) {
console.log(data);
}
}
streamTweets();
Other packages similar to twitter-api-v2
twit
The 'twit' package is another popular library for interacting with the Twitter API. It supports both REST and streaming APIs, similar to twitter-api-v2. However, 'twit' is designed for the older Twitter API v1.1, whereas twitter-api-v2 is specifically for the newer API v2.
twitter-lite
The 'twitter-lite' package is a lightweight alternative for interacting with the Twitter API. It supports both REST and streaming APIs and is designed to be minimalistic and efficient. While it can be used with both API v1.1 and v2, it may lack some of the more advanced features and ease of use provided by twitter-api-v2.
node-twitter-api
The 'node-twitter-api' package provides a simple interface for interacting with the Twitter API. It supports basic functionalities such as posting tweets and fetching user information. However, it is less comprehensive and may not support all the features available in twitter-api-v2.
Strongly typed, full-featured, light, versatile yet powerful Twitter API v1.1 and v2 client for Node.js.
Highlights
✅ Ready for v2 and good ol' v1.1 Twitter API
✅ Light: No dependencies, 11.7kb minified+gzipped
✅ Bundled types for request parameters and responses
✅ Streaming support
✅ Pagination utils
✅ Media upload helpers
Why?
Sometimes, you just want to quickly bootstrap an application using the Twitter API.
Even if they're a lot a available librairies on the JavaScript ecosystem, they usually just
provide wrappers around HTTP methods, and some of them are bloated with many dependencies.
twitter-api-v2
meant to provide full endpoint wrapping, from method name to response data,
using descriptive typings for read/write/DMs rights, request parameters and response payload.
A small feature comparaison with other libs:
Package | API version(s) | Response typings | Media helpers | Pagination | Subdependencies | Size (gzip) |
---|
twitter-api-v2 | v1.1, v2, labs | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | 0 | ~11.7 kB |
twit | v1.1 | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | 51 | ~214.5 kB |
twitter | v1.1 | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | 50 | ~182.1 kB |
twitter-lite | v1.1, v2 | ❌ | ❌* | ❌ | 4 | ~5.3 kB |
twitter-v2 | v2 | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | 7 | ~4.5 kB |
*No support for media/upload
, cannot send a multipart/form-data
encoded-body without tricks
Features
Here's the detailed feature list of twitter-api-v2
:
Basics:
- Support for v1.1 and v2 of Twitter API
- Make signed HTTP requests to Twitter with every Twitter required auth type:
- classic OAuth 1.0a authentification for user-context endpoints
- OAuth2 Bearer token for app-only endpoints
- Basic HTTP Authorization, required for some auth endpoints or Entreprise API
- Helpers for numerous HTTP request methods (
GET
, POST
, PUT
, DELETE
and PATCH
),
that handle query string parse & format, automatic body formatting and more - High-class support for stream endpoints, with easy data consumption and auto-reconnect on stream errors
Request helpers:
- Automatic paginator for endpoints like user and tweet timelines,
allowing payload consumption with modern asynchronous iterators until your rate-limit is hit
- Convenient methods for authentication - generate auth links and ask for tokens to your users will be a breeze
- Media upload with API v1.1, including long video & subtitles support, automatic media type detection,
chunked upload and support for concurrent uploads
- Dedicated methods that wraps API v1.1 & v2 endpoints, with typed arguments and fully typed responses
(WIP - not all public endpoints are available)
- Bundled parsing of rate limit headers
- Typed errors, meaningful error messages, error enumerations for both v1.1 and v2
Type-safe first:
- Typings for tweet, user, media entities (and more) are bundled in this package!
- Type-safe wrapping of dedicated methods in 3 right level: DM/Read-write/Read-only (just like Twitter API do!) -
you can declare a read-only client - you will only see the methods associated with read-only endpoints
And last but not least, fully powered by native Promise
s.
How to use
Install it through your favorite package manager:
yarn add twitter-api-v2
npm i twitter-api-v2
Here's is a quick example of usage:
import TwitterApi from 'twitter-api-v2';
const twitterClient = new TwitterApi('<YOUR_APP_USER_TOKEN>');
const roClient = twitterClient.readOnly;
const user = await roClient.v2.userByUsername('plhery');
await twitterClient.v1.tweet('Hello, this is a test.');
await twitterClient.v1.uploadMedia('./big-buck-bunny.mp4');
await twitterClient.v2.get('tweets/search/recent', { query: 'nodeJS', max_results: 100 });
const tweets = await twitterClient.get('https://api.twitter.com/2/tweets/search/recent?query=nodeJS&max_results=100');
Basics
You want to know more about client usage? See the Basics!
Examples
Wanna see that in action? Jump to Examples part.
Authentification
Lost between the different ways to auth inside Twitter API?
Don't know how to implement 3-legged OAuth flow?
See Authentification part to know more and have a comprehensive guide a every Twitter authentification process.
Streaming
APIs dedicated to streaming are available in Streaming part.
Full package API
Each Twitter endpoint > method association is described in details inside the v1.1 comprehensive documentation
and the v2 comprehensive documentation.