gathertweet

The goal of gathertweet is to provide a simple command line utility that wraps key functions from [rtweet](https://rtweet.info). The magic of **gathertweet** is that it grants you the power to **quickly set up twitter monitoring and tweet gathering** while saving you from the pain of **writing a bunch of boilerplate code** to - save new tweets without losing previously collected tweets, - join multiple searches, - update tweet stats, - simplify stored tweets, - schedule easily with [cron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron), - and more… gathe**rtweet** is a thin wrapper around [rtweet](https://rtweet.info), the excellent R interface to Twitter written by [Mike Kearney](https://mikewk.com/). If you use gathertweet, please ensure that you [cite rtweet directly](https://rtweet.info/authors.html). ``` r > citation("rtweet") To cite rtweet use: Kearney, M. W. (2018). rtweet: Collecting Twitter Data. R package version 0.6.7 Retrieved from https://cran.r-project.org/package=rtweet A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is @Manual{rtweet-package, title = {rtweet: Collecting Twitter Data}, author = {Michael W. Kearney}, year = {2018}, note = {R package version 0.6.7}, url = {https://cran.r-project.org/package=rtweet}, } ``` ## Installation This is a work in progress and may not work well for you yet. But you are welcome to install **gathertweet** and try it out. ``` r # install.packages("remotes") remotes::install_github("gadenbuie/gathertweet") ``` Once you’ve installed the package, you need to run ``` r gathertweet::install_gathertweet() ``` which adds `gathertweet` to `/usr/local/bin` as a symlink (you can adjust where this link is created in `install_gathertweet()`). If you need admin rights to install, try sudo Rscript -e "gathertweet::install_gathertweet()" from the command line. ## Example ### Use gathertweet from the command line Create a directory to store tweets ``` bash mkdir rstats cd rstats ``` Get 100 \#rstats tweets ``` bash > gathertweet search --n 100 --quiet "#rstats" INFO [2019-05-06 21:56:27] ---- gathertweet search start ---- INFO [2019-05-06 21:56:27] Searching for "#rstats" INFO [2019-05-06 21:56:28] Gathered 98 tweets INFO [2019-05-06 21:56:28] Total of 98 tweets in tweets.rds INFO [2019-05-06 21:56:28] ---- gathertweet search complete ---- ``` Get more tweets, automatically starting from end of the last search ``` bash > gathertweet search --n 100 --quiet "#rstats" INFO [2019-05-06 21:57:29] ---- gathertweet search start ---- INFO [2019-05-06 21:57:29] Searching for "#rstats" INFO [2019-05-06 21:57:29] Tweets from 1125579895403352064 INFO [2019-05-06 21:57:29] No new tweets. ``` Update the stored data about those \#rstats tweets ``` bash > gathertweet update INFO [2019-05-06 21:57:30] ---- gathertweet update start ---- INFO [2019-05-06 21:57:30] Updating tweets in tweets.rds INFO [2019-05-06 21:57:30] Getting 98 tweets INFO [2019-05-06 21:57:31] ---- gathertweet update complete ---- ``` ``` bash > ls -lh total 40K -rw-rw-r-- 1 garrick garrick 39K May 6 21:57 tweets.rds ``` Gather user timelines ``` bash > gathertweet timeline hadleywickham jennybryan dataandme INFO [2019-05-06 21:57:32] ---- gathertweet timeline start ---- INFO [2019-05-06 21:57:32] Gathering tweets by hadleywickham, jennybryan, dataandme WARN [2019-05-06 21:57:32] Twitter API for timelines returns a maximum of 3200 tweets per user INFO [2019-05-06 21:58:01] Gathered 7427 tweets from 3 users INFO [2019-05-06 21:58:02] Total of 7524 tweets in tweets.rds INFO [2019-05-06 21:58:02] ---- gathertweet timeline complete ---- ``` ### Schedule tweet gathering using cron The primary use case of gathertweet is to make it easy to set up [cron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron) to periodically gather tweets. Here’s a simple example to download all tweets matching the search term `rstats OR tidyverse` every night at midnight. The tweets are stored, by default, in `tweets.rds` in `~/rstats-tweets`. ``` bash crontab -e # m h dom mon dow command 0 0 * * * (cd ~/rstats-tweets && ~/bin/gathertweet search --polite 'rstats OR tidyverse' >>gathertweet.log) ``` ## Documentation ``` bash > gathertweet --help ``` Gather tweets from the command line Usage: gathertweet search [--file=] [options] [--] ... gathertweet timeline [options] [--] ... gathertweet update [--file= --and-simplify --polite --debug-args --token= --backup --backup-dir=] gathertweet simplify [--file= --output= --debug-args --polite] [...] Options: -h --help Show this screen. --file Name of RDS file where tweets are stored [default: tweets.rds] --no-parse Disable parsing of the results --token See {rtweet} for more information --retryonratelimit Wait and retry when rate limited (only relevant when n exceeds 18000 tweets) --quiet Disable printing of {rtweet} processing messages --polite Only allow one process (search|update) to run at a time --backup Create a backup of existing tweet file --backup-dir Location for backups [default: backups] --debug-args Debug input arguments --and-simplify Create additional simplified tweet set. Run `gathertweet simplify` manually for more control. search: Search terms. Individual search terms are queried separately, but duplicated tweets are removed from the stored results. Each search term counts against the 15 minute rate limit of 180 searches, which can be avoided by manually joining search terms into a single query. NOTE: Wrap queries with spaces in 'single quotes': only use double quotes within single quotes. --type Type of search results: "recent", "mixed", or "popular" [default: recent] --geocode Geographical limiter of the template "latitude,longitude,radius" --since_id Return results with an ID greather than (newer than) or equal to since_id, automatically extracted from the existing tweets , if it exists, and ignored when is set. Use "none" for all available tweets, or "last" for the maximum seen status_id in existing tweets. [default: last] search and timeline: -n, --n Number of tweets to return [default: 18000] --include_rts Logical indicating whether retweets should be included (default is to exclude RTs) --max_id Return tweets with an ID less (older) than or equal to timeline: A list of users as user names, IDs, or a mixture of both, separated by spaces. --home If included, returns home-timeline instead of user-timeline. simplify: Tweet fields that should be included. By default includes: `status_id`, `created_at`, `user_id`, `screen_name`, `text`, `favorite_count`, `retweet_count`, `is_quote`, `hashtags`, `mentions_screen_name`, `profile_url`, `profile_image_url`, `media_url`, `urls_url`, `urls_expanded_url`. --output Output file, default is input file with `_simplified` appended to name.