• 7/2/2015: If you need geocode Twitter users (e.g., figure out where the user is from based on the location string in their profile), you can take a look at this TwitterUserGeocoder
• 7/2/2015: I've developed another set of scripts (without using redis) with different but similar use cases. Specifically, my use case requires me to 1) track a set of keywords; and 2) track a set of users. The new scripts, for example, will keep pulling in new tweets if you provide a set of seed user ids. It's not in the state that can be released yet, but email me if you are interested in that.
• Older: I haven't been updating this for a while, but I just setup a EC2 instance and tested this. Looks like most of the things are still working fine. I have some new research needs myself, so I might update this more frequently in the next few months. But, in general, I would be happy to take requests to add specific functionalities, merge pull requests, and even requests for specific datasets. Just make a ticket ;)*

A crawler that helps you collect data from Twitter for research. Most of the heavy works are already done by Twython. tweetf0rm is just a collection of python scripts help to deal with parallelization, proxies, and errors such as connection failures. In most use cases, it will auto-restart when an exception occurs. And, when a crawler exceeds the Twitter API's rate limit, the crawler will pause itself and auto-restart later.

To workaround Twitter's rate limits, tweetf0rm can spawn multiple crawlers each with different proxy and twitter dev account on a single computer (or on multiple computers) and collaboratively farm user tweets and twitter relationship networks (i.e., friends and followers). The communication channel for coordinating among multiple crawlers is built on top of redis -- a high performance in-memory key-value store. It has its own scheduler that can balance the load of each worker (or worker machines).

It's quite stable for the things that I want to do. I have collected billions of tweets from 2.6 millions twitter users in about 2 weeks with a single machine.

Twitter license (or at least the company's position on this) does not allow me redistribute the crawled data (e.g., someone asked the question a while back: https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/8232). But, here is what I have:

• Health topics followers: I crawled 2,686,823 users' tweets (i.e., as of 11/12/2013; maximum of 3,200 per user, limitted by Twitter apis) in a matter of two weeks. All thhese twitter users follow one of the following, what I call, health-related information centers (i.e., person or organization who share health-related information, such as the CNNHealth. Note that, some of the users either haven't posted anything or have set the privacy setting to private, so it will show zero tweets for these users. Anyway, I haven't done anything to this dataset yet besides doing some pre-processing (indexing, calculate common statistics), although I have some research ideas that I am planning to try. If you want to get a hand on this dataset (either collaborate with me or just want the data), contact me at ji0ng.bi0n@gmail.com :). The detailed stats such as how many tweets will be posted as soon as my code gets them calculated (821,449,519 unique tweets).

  • https://twitter.com/RWJF
  • https://twitter.com/samhsagov
  • https://twitter.com/PublicHealth
  • https://twitter.com/WebMD
  • https://twitter.com/NIMHgov
  • https://twitter.com/HHSGov
  • https://twitter.com/drsanjaygupta
  • https://twitter.com/womenshealth
  • https://twitter.com/HealthHabits
  • https://twitter.com/medlineplus
  • https://twitter.com/KHNews
  • https://twitter.com/NIH
  • https://twitter.com/cnnhealth
  • https://twitter.com/DrOz
  • https://twitter.com/projecthopeorg
  • https://twitter.com/NBCNewsHealth
  • https://twitter.com/LIVESTRONG
  • https://twitter.com/JohnsHopkinsSPH
  • https://twitter.com/CDC_eHealth
  • https://twitter.com/healthfinder
  • https://twitter.com/FamHealthGuide
  • https://twitter.com/AmericanCancer
  • https://twitter.com/HealthCareGov
  • https://twitter.com/goodhealth
  • https://twitter.com/CDCemergency
  • https://twitter.com/Disc_Health
  • https://twitter.com/HarvardHealth
  • https://twitter.com/Health_Affairs
  • https://twitter.com/WomensHealthMag
  • https://twitter.com/latimeshealth
  • https://twitter.com/FDA_Drug_Info
  • https://twitter.com/nytimeshealth
  • https://twitter.com/MayoClinic
  • https://twitter.com/AIDSgov
  • https://twitter.com/NPRHealth
  • https://twitter.com/USDAFoodSafety
  • https://twitter.com/DailyHealthTips
  • https://twitter.com/MinorityHealth
  • https://twitter.com/RedCross
  • https://twitter.com/FDAWomen
  • https://twitter.com/WSJhealth
  • https://twitter.com/runnersworld
  • https://twitter.com/bbchealth
  • https://twitter.com/CMSGov
  • https://twitter.com/AmerMedicalAssn
  • https://twitter.com/KatherineHobson
  • https://twitter.com/MensHealthMag
  • https://twitter.com/FDArecalls
  • https://twitter.com/WSJhealthblog
  • https://twitter.com/CDCgov
  • https://twitter.com/WHO
  • https://twitter.com/GoHealthyPeople
  • https://twitter.com/CDCFlu
  • https://twitter.com/girlshealth

None... just clone this and start using it. It's not that complicated yet to have a setup.py..

git clone git://github.com/bianjiang/tweetf0rm.git

To run this, you will need:

• Twython
• futures if you are on Python 2.7
• redis server and redis python library
• requests
• (optional) lxml if you want to use the crawl_proxies.py script to get a list of free proxies from http://spys.ru/en/http-proxy-list/.

• Support running multiple crawler processes (through python multiprocessing) with different proxies on single node;
• Support a cluster of nodes to collaboratively f0rm tweets.

First, you'll want to login the twitter dev site and create an applciation at https://dev.twitter.com/apps to have access to the Twitter API!

After you register, create an access token and grab your applications Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access token and Access token secret from the OAuth tool tab. Put these information into a config.json under apikeys (see an example below).

You have to have a redis server setup (redis quick start). Note that if you want to run multiple nodes, you will only need to have one redis instance, and that instance has to be reachable from other nodes. The redis_config needs to be specified in the config.json as well.

Even you only wants to run on one node with multiple crawler processes, you will still need a local redis server for coordinating the tasks.

	{
		"apikeys": {
			"i0mf0rmer01" :{
				"app_key":"CONSUMER_KEY",
				"app_secret":"CONSUMER_SECRET",
				"oauth_token":"ACCESS_TOKEN",
				"oauth_token_secret":"ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET"
			},
			"i0mf0rmer02" :{
				"app_key":"CONSUMER_KEY",
				"app_secret":"CONSUMER_SECRET",
				"oauth_token":"ACCESS_TOKEN",
				"oauth_token_secret":"ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET"
			},
			"i0mf0rmer03" :{
				"app_key":"CONSUMER_KEY",
				"app_secret":"CONSUMER_SECRET",
				"oauth_token":"ACCESS_TOKEN",
				"oauth_token_secret":"ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET"
			}
		},
		"redis_config": {
			"host": "localhost",
			"port": 6379,
			"db": 0,
			"password": "iloveusm"
		},
		"verbose": "True",
		"output": "./data",
		"archive_output": "./data"
	}

Most of these options are straightforward. output defines where the crawled data will be stored; archive_output defines where the gzipped files will be stored (without compression, it takes a lot of space to store the raw tweets; about 100G per 100,000 users tweets).

The proxies need to be listed in proxy.json file like:

	{
		"proxies": [{"66.35.68.146:8089": "http"}, {"69.197.132.80:7808": "http"}, {"198.56.208.37:8089": "http"}]
	}

The proxy will be verified upon bootstrap, and only the valid ones will be kept and used (currently it's not switching to a different proxy when a proxy server goes down, but will be added soon). There are a lot free proxy servers available.

Remember that Twitter's rate limit is per account as as well as per IP. So, you should have at least one twitter API account per proxy. Ideally, you should more proxies than twitter accounts, so that tweetf0rm can switch to a different proxy, if one failed (haven't implemented yet, but higher on the list).

To start the ``f0rm", you can simply run:

$ ./bootstrap.sh -c config.json -p proxies.json

To issue a command to the f0rm, you are basically pushing commands to redis. This is how the commands should look like, e.g.,

cmd = {
 	"cmd": "CRAWL_FRIENDS",
 	"user_id": 1948122342,
 	"data_type": "ids",
 	"depth": 2,
 	"bucket":"friend_ids"
}

cmd = {
	"cmd": "CRAWL_FRIENDS",
	"user_id": 1948122342,
	"data_type": "users",
	"depth": 2,
	"bucket":"friends"
}

cmd = {
	"cmd": "CRAWL_USER_TIMELINE",
	"user_id": 53039176,
	"bucket": "timelines"
} 

bucket determine where the results will be saved in the output folder (specified in config.json). All twitter data are json encoded strings, and output files are normally named with the twitter user id, e.g., if you are crawling a user's timeline, all his/her tweets will be organized in the "timelines" sub-folder with his/her twitter id (numerical and unique identifier for each twitter user).

There is a client.py script that helps you generate these commands and push to the local redis node queue. e.g.,

$ client.sh -c tests/config.json -cmd CRAWL_FRIENDS -d 1 -dt "ids" -uid 1948122342

means you want to crawl all friends of uid=1948122342 with depth as 1 and the results are just the twitter user ids of his/her friends. There are also commands you can use to crawl a list of users, e.g.,

$ client.sh -c tests/config.json -cmd BATCH_CRAWL_FRIENDS -d 1 -dt "ids" -j user_ids.json

instead of providing a specific user_id, you provide a json file that contains a list of user_ids.

There is also a script (scripts/crawl_proxies.py) for crawling proxies server list from spy.ru. It will crawl the http proxies listed in spy.ru, test each one and produce the proxies.json with valid proxies.

Note that, if you don't use proxies, you can only have one crawler active, since Twitter's rate limit applies to both the account as well as the IP.

The MIT License (MIT) Copyright (c) 2013 Jiang Bian (ji0ng.bi0n@gmail.com)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.