twitter_friendly

The twitter_friendly is a gem to crawl many friends/followers with minimal code. When you want to get a list of friends/followers for a user, all you need to write is the below.

require 'twitter_friendly'

client =
    TwitterFriendly::Client.new(
        consumer_key:        'CONSUMER_KEY',
        consumer_secret:     'CONSUMER_SECRET',
        access_token:        'ACCESS_TOKEN',
        access_token_secret: 'ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET',
        expires_in:          86400 # 1day
    )

ids = []

begin
  ids = client.follower_ids('yousuck2020')
rescue Twitter::Error::TooManyRequests => e
  seconds = e.rate_limit.reset_in.to_i # or client.rate_limit.follower_ids[:reset_in]
  sleep seconds
  retry
end

puts "ids #{ids.size}"
File.write('ids.txt', ids.join("\n"))

• Auto pagination
• Auto caching
• Parallelly fetching

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'twitter_friendly'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install twitter_friendly

Configuration

You can pass configuration options as a block to TwitterFriendly::Client.new just like the below.

client = TwitterFriendly::Client.new do |config|
  config.consumer_key        = "YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY"
  config.consumer_secret     = "YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET"
  config.access_token        = "YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN"
  config.access_token_secret = "YOUR_ACCESS_SECRET"
end

Useful features

After configuring a client, you can do the following things.

Fetch all friends's user IDs (by screen name or user ID, or by implicit authenticated user)

ids = client.follower_ids('gem')
ids.size
# => 1741

As using a cache, it's super fast from the second time.

Benchmark.bm 20 do |r|
  r.report "Fetch follower_ids" do
    client.follower_ids('gem')
  end
  r.report "(Cached)" do
    client.follower_ids('gem')
  end
end

#                            user     system      total        real
# Fetch follower_ids     0.010330   0.003607   0.013937 (  0.981068)
# (Cached)               0.000865   0.000153   0.001018 (  0.001019) <- Roughly 900 times faster!

You don't need to write a boilerplate code as having auto pagination feature.

users = client.follower_ids('a_user_has_many_friends')
users.size
# => 50000

If you don't use twitter_friendly gem, you must write the code like the below to fetch all follower's ids.

def collect_with_max_id(collection=[], max_id=nil, &block)
  response = yield(max_id)
  collection += response
  response.empty? ? collection.flatten : collect_with_max_id(collection, response.last.id - 1, &block)
end

ids =
  collect_with_max_id do |max_id|
    options = {count: 200, include_rts: true}
    options[:max_id] = max_id unless max_id.nil?
    client.follower_ids('user_name', options)
  end

Additionally, twitter_friendly gem has a parallel execution feature.

ids = [id1, id2, id3, ... , id1000]

Benchmark.bm 25 do |r|
  r.report "Fetch users in parallel" do
    client.users(ids)
  end

  client.cache.clear

  r.report "Fetch users in serial" do
    client.users(ids, parallel: false)
  end
end

#                                 user     system      total        real
# Fetch users in parallel     0.271966   0.057981   0.329947 (  2.675270) <- Super fast!
# Fetch users in serial       0.201375   0.044399   0.245774 (  8.068372)

Usage examples

Fetch all friends's user IDs (by screen name or user ID, or by implicit authenticated user)

client.friend_ids('gem')
client.friend_ids(213747670)
client.friend_ids

Fetch all followers's user IDs (by screen name or user ID, or by implicit authenticated user)

client.follower_ids('gem')
client.follower_ids(213747670)
client.follower_ids

Fetch all friends with profile details (by screen name or user ID, or by implicit authenticated user)

client.friends('gem')
client.friends(213747670)
client.friends

Fetch all followers with profile details (by screen name or user ID, or by implicit authenticated user)

client.followers('gem')
client.followers(213747670)
client.followers

Fetch the timeline of Tweets (by screen name or user ID, or by implicit authenticated user)

tweets = client.user_timeline('screen_name')

tweets.size
# => 588

tweets[0][:text]
# => "Your tweet text..."

tweets[0][:user][:screen_name]
# => "screen_name"

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/ts-3156/twitter_friendly.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.