A simple script to keep in a SQLite database our followers of our Twitter account, but more important it also register those people that unfollowed us, which can be determine by comparing our followers in database with those the Twitter API returns.

Also this script has a simple function for follow everybody who follow you and that you have not followed back yet. For use this function you should register an app with read-write permission level.

Speaking about registering an app, you can do it going to https://apps.twitter.com, you choose a name for the app, they give you a consumer key and consumer secret both you have to put it at the begging of the script file in the variables with the same names all on upper case.

There in the API Keys section of your app on the Twitter app page you'll have also access token and access token secret, which you could pass to the script when you run it and it ask for it if there aren't any records on the credentials table on the database.

• Python 2.x.x or Python 3.x.x (yes, it works on both versions!).
• tweepy, a twitter library python.

You can install tweepy with pip (or easy_install):

pip install tweepy

You do this at the beginning of the script file, I prefered to keep this in the same script instead of making a settings file.

You change the database in the DB_NAME variable, by default its name is tw_users.db.

DB_NAME = "tw_users.db" # Database name

You can choose the directory where to store the database in the variable DIR by default is ~/follpector/.

DIR = "follpector_db" # Directory where store the db

You specified the consumer tokens you got from Twitter after registering an app in the variables CONSUMER_KEY and CONSUMER_SECRET, their name are self-descriptive as the other ones.

CONSUMER_KEY = "YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY"
CONSUMER_SECRET = "YOUR_CONSUMR_SECRET"

If you want to get the new followers and more important the new unfollowers in your e-mail inbox you do this by setting the variable MAIL which is a dictionary with keys:

• to: Sender e-mail.
• from: Recipient e-mail.
• subject: Subject of the mail.
• passwd: Password of the sender e-mail.

Note: Only gmail accounts as the sender e-mail will work.

 MAIL = {  
			'to' : 'walterwhite@gmail.com', 
			'from' : 'pinkman@gmail.com', 
			'passwd' : 's3cr3t', 
			'subject' : '[Follpector] Your (un)followers report' 
        }

You just have to call the script like any other python script.

python follpector.py

For using the follow_all function call your script like this:

python follpector.py --follow-all your_username

If the app that you registered on Twitter (from which you got the consumer access tokens that you're using in the script) has read-write permissions then it will work, otherwise not, because it needs write permissions for that. Anyway I have not tested that function (I don't want to follow all those marketing and politics accounts that follow me), but it should works.

If you don't have a database yet it will create it, if you don't have access tokens in the credentials table the script will ask you for it and will store it for later use.

You could if you want configure this script to be automatically executed with crontab on GNU/Linux so you will get the report by email. You could redirect the standard output and error output to a file, something like this:

python follpector.py --follow-all mrx > ~/home/mrx/.follpector.log 2>&1 

It would redirect all output to that file, also it would rewrite it every time. You could run the script automatically anytime you want using crontab. Here is a How-To about crontab

Greetings,

A.J.