twi-cli v0.3.6

Command Line Basic Twitter API Client

A simple tool for basic operating with Twitter API from the command line.

Get started

Install with as simple as:

npm install -g twi-cli

You can use it then from anywhere on your command line.

Examples of usage

To issue a GET request to statuses/user_timeline endpoint to get 1 latest tweet from a user with id 62569723 you may run the following command:

$ twi-cli statuses user_timeline --count=1 --trim_user=1 --user_id=62569723

You may fetch all tweets from that same user recursively with only one additional arguments --recursive:

$ twi-cli statuses user_timeline --recursive --count=200 --trim_user=1 --user_id=62569723

This magical flag --recursive (or -r for short alias) will handle cursoring for you as well.

Here is how to lookup user_id for some user by a screen_name:

$ twi-cli users show --screen_name=nilfalse

Authentication

For now there is only one way to provide the tool with Twitter credentials – use environment variables.

These include:

• TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY
• TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET
• TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY
• TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET
• TWITTER_BEARER_TOKEN

Use any of these (or any combination) which fits your needs best.

NOTE: for Application Only based authentication, the only env required is TWITTER_BEARER_TOKEN. You may read more about Application-only authentication at Twitter docs.

Output

The tool tries its best to keep its output as similar to the original Twitter response as possible so you are not enforced to learn one more layer of abstraction. At the same time there are a few little exceptions to this rule, as author considers these to be useful for the most cases:

1. Any ids get replaced with their id_str counterparts (with redundant id_str being completely stripped from output). This includes all fields ending with id_str, for instance in_reply_to_status_id gets always replaced with value from in_reply_to_status_id_str (even if it is null).
2. All fields with name created_at (including nested at any level of deep) get parsed into ISO 8601 compliant string. For instance, 2017-01-01T08:38:40Z.
3. Most of the time Twitter response is an array of some entities. For the purposes of extensibility top-level arrays get printed without enclosing square brackets [] and items are not separated by commas ,. Instead, every item is put on its own one line, so the next item is the next line and so forth. This must eventually simplify streaming once the code for it is ready.
4. Cursored responses in --recursive mode will output content of their ids field as the cursors are already handled by twi-cli at that moment.

TODO

1. Add option to request Application-only Bearer token from command line.
2. Make streaming possible using this tool.

Contribution

Please feel free to fork, pull request, discuss, share your ideas and raise issues. Any feedback is welcome!