Twitter is a widely used social network around the world. A Twitter presence makes sense when the owner of the account is able to keep his or her followers engaged with new tweets and retweets, replying to messages and following other accounts that interest them, something that is not easy for many people. This is because it consumes a lot of time to achieve an active Twitter presence. However, it is possible to automate your Twitter activity using a Twitter Bot. You can create a Twitter Bot on Python using Tweepy. In this article, we are going to introduce you to the requirements of creating a Twitter Bot in Python with Tweepy.

Introduction to Tweepy

Tweepy is a Python package that allows one to access the Twitter API with python. To use Tweepy, you will need to learn about APIs, something that is well detailed on RapidAPI. Tweepy comes with a set of methods and classes representing the models and endpoints of Twitter. It also takes care of several implementation details such as;

• HTTP requests

• Encoding and Decoding of data

• OAuth authentication

• Results pagination

• Streams

• Rate limits

Tweepy allows one to focus on the functionality that they want to build and forget about the low-level details above. You will also be able to use almost all the functionality provided by the Twitter API through Tweepy.

Using Tweepy

To use Tweepy, you will need to first install it and then configure authentication credentials. Tweepy can be installed using a Python package manager called pip. After successfully installing and setting up Tweepy, you will then need to create the Twitter API authentication credentials.

The Twitter API allows requests that use the OAuth method of authentication only. To use the API, you are supposed to create the required authentication credentials. The credentials include;

• Consumer key and consumer secret

• Access token and access secret

To create the key, secrets, and token above, you will need to log into your Twitter account or sign up to Twitter. You will then need to apply for a developer account and follow instructions provided by Twitter to get them.

Tweepy Functionality

Like we said earlier, Tweepy gives us a platform through which we can access the Twitter API using Python. This is made possible by Tweepy’s ability to encapsulate the complexity of the Twitter API. The functionality of Tweepy is classified into these groups;

• The API class: The API class comes with many methods that give you access to the Twitter API endpoints. 

• Cursors: Tweepy uses cursors to reduce the complexity involved in working with paginated results. Most Twitter API endpoints use pagination when returning their results.

• OAuth: All the Twitter API requirements when it comes to authentication are handled by Tweepy. It comes with an OAuthHandler class that is used in setting the credentials used in all API calls.

• Models: Tweepy comes with model classes that encapsulate the responses one gets from Twitter API methods.

• Streams: Streams allows one to get tweets that match a certain select criteria.

Those are the basics of making a Twitter Bot in Python with Tweepy. After understanding this, you can now go ahead and create a Bot that will automate all your Twitter activity and keep your followers engaged.