TL;DR

In the quest to fetch a whole thread of tweets from Twitter, MojoX::Twitter is a very promising Perl module.

In previous post Scrape a Thread of Tweets we left with the intention to re-do the whole thing without scraping stuff from a web page, but leveraging the native Twitter API. This is where we start!

Getting authorised to the Twitter API

The first thing that you have to do is to apply for a developer account.

It will take some time to get through, especially if you’re honest because they make you questions like will your application be available to the government? As someone that usually either blogs or anyway puts the crappy code on GitHub, yes it is available to whoever wants to use it!

They ask you questions in the application form and they will ask those questions again via email. Don’t despair, after a couple of rounds you should be fine.

Available Perl modules

There are a couple of Perl modules that seem interesting in CPAN:

• Twitter::API: this is an evolution of a previous module Net::Twitter and seems fairly comprehensive. If anything, it is a bit intimidating that the very first example $client in the synopsis suggests to include an Enchilada:

### Common usage ###
 
use Twitter::API;
my $client = Twitter::API->new_with_traits(
    traits              => 'Enchilada',
    consumer_key        => $YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY,
    consumer_secret     => $YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET,
    access_token        => $YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN,
    access_token_secret => $YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET,
);
...

• MojoX::Twitter: this is advertised as a Simple Twitter Client and yes it is. Almost no documentation, apart from an example and the indication that it is without OAuth authentication. Mmmmh…

I decided to give the simpler one a try. The lack of OAuth authentication can seem strange - every Twitter API requires some kind of it - so I figured that it was only in the spirit of the very, very concise documentation.

Having chosen MojoX::Twitter, we will also have to install Mojolicious that will give us access to the Mojo framework, yay!

The example client works!

The example client seems to work, here is an adapted form:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use 5.024;
use warnings;
use experimental qw< postderef signatures >;
no warnings qw< experimental::postderef experimental::signatures >;

use Mojo::JSON 'j';
use Mojo::File 'path';
use MojoX::Twitter;

my $credentials = j path('twitter-credentials.json')->slurp;
my $client      = MojoX::Twitter->new(
   consumer_key        => $credentials->{'api-key'},
   consumer_secret     => $credentials->{'api-secret-key'},
   access_token        => $credentials->{'access-token'},
   access_token_secret => $credentials->{'access-token-secret'},
);

my $user =
  $client->request(GET => 'users/show', {screen_name => 'polettix'});

say j $user;

The credentials are stored in a separate file twitter-credentials.json, which is a simple JSON file like this:

{
   "api-key": "yadda",
   "api-secret-key": "yadda",
   "access-token": "yadda-yadda",
   "access-token-secret": "yadda"
}

The $client->request(...) call returns a hash reference in the case of users/show, but it might return something different for other APIs. In this example, we’re just turning it (back) to JSON and printing it in the last line. Considering that j prints out minified JSON, you’ll probably want to pipe it to jq to read it!

Enough for today

So this is it for today, stay tuned for the evolutions and leave a comment if you want!