In gadenbuie/gathertweet: Gather Tweets from the Command Line with rtweet

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  cache = FALSE,
  comment = "",
  prompt = TRUE,
  fig.path = "man/figures/README-",
  out.width = "100%"
)
if (dir.exists(".tmp")) unlink(".tmp", recursive = TRUE)
dir.create(".tmp/rstats", recursive = TRUE, showWarnings = FALSE)
knitr::opts_knit$set(root.dir = ".tmp/rstats")

gathertweet

The goal of gathertweet is to provide a simple command line utility that wraps key functions from rtweet.

The magic of gathertweet is that it grants you the power to quickly set up twitter monitoring and tweet gathering while saving you from the pain of writing a bunch of boilerplate code to

• save new tweets without losing previously collected tweets,
• join multiple searches,
• update tweet stats,
• simplify stored tweets,
• schedule easily with cron,
• and more...

gathertweet is a thin wrapper around rtweet, the excellent R interface to Twitter written by Mike Kearney. If you use gathertweet, please ensure that you cite rtweet directly.

citation("rtweet")

Installation

This is a work in progress and may not work well for you yet. But you are welcome to install gathertweet and try it out.

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("gadenbuie/gathertweet")

Once you've installed the package, you need to run

gathertweet::install_gathertweet()

which adds gathertweet to /usr/local/bin as a symlink (you can adjust where this link is created in install_gathertweet()). If you need admin rights to install, try

sudo Rscript -e "gathertweet::install_gathertweet()"

from the command line.

Example

Use gathertweet from the command line

Create a directory to store tweets

mkdir rstats
cd rstats

knitr::opts_knit$set(root.dir = ".tmp/rstats")

Get 100 #rstats tweets

gathertweet search --n 100 --quiet "#rstats"

Get more tweets, automatically starting from end of the last search

Sys.sleep(60)

gathertweet search --n 100 --quiet "#rstats"

Update the stored data about those #rstats tweets

gathertweet update

ls -lh

Gather user timelines

gathertweet timeline hadleywickham jennybryan dataandme

Schedule tweet gathering using cron

The primary use case of gathertweet is to make it easy to set up cron to periodically gather tweets. Here's a simple example to download all tweets matching the search term rstats OR tidyverse every night at midnight. The tweets are stored, by default, in tweets.rds in ~/rstats-tweets.

crontab -e

# m h dom mon dow   command
0 0 * * * (cd ~/rstats-tweets && ~/bin/gathertweet search --polite 'rstats OR tidyverse' >>gathertweet.log)

Documentation

> gathertweet --help

{bash gathertweet_help, echo=FALSE} ../../inst/gathertweet.R --help

gadenbuie/gathertweet documentation built on March 15, 2020, 12:32 p.m.