See Twitter search results in Zulip! This is great for seeing and
discussing who is talking about you, friends, competitors, or
important topics in real time.

{!create-stream.md!}

{!download-python-bindings.md!}

This bot should be set up on a trusted machine, because your API
key is visible to local users through the command line or config
file.

Next, install **version 1.0 or later** of the `twitter-python`
library. If your operating system distribution doesn’t package a new
enough version, you can install the library from source from
[the GitHub repository](https://github.com/bear/python-twitter).

Next, set up Twitter authentication. This bot uses OAuth to
authenticate with Twitter, and in order to obtain a consumer key &
secret, you must register a new application under your Twitter
account:

1. Log in to <http://dev.twitter.com>.

2. In the menu under your username, click
   [My Applications](https://dev.twitter.com/apps). From this page,
   create a new application.

3. Click on the application you created and click **create my access
   token**. Fill in the requested values.

To configure and deploy this bot:

1.  Create a `~/.zulip_twitterrc` with the following contents:

        [twitter]
        consumer_key =
        consumer_secret =
        access_token_key =
        access_token_secret =

2.  Test the script by running it manually:

        /usr/local/share/zulip/integrations/twitter/twitter-search-bot --search="@nprnews,quantum
        physics" --site={{ external_api_uri_subdomain }}

    Note: `twitter-search-bot` may install to a different location on
    your operating system distribution.

3.  Configure a crontab entry for this script. A sample crontab entry
    that will process tweets every minute is:

        * * * * * /usr/local/share/zulip/integrations/twitter/twitter-search-bot
        --search="@nprnews,quantum physics" --site={{ external_api_uri_subdomain }}

When someone tweets a message containing one of your search terms,
you’ll get a Zulip on your specified stream, with the search term as
the topic.

{!congrats.md!}

![](/static/images/integrations/twitter/001.png)

Note that the Twitter search bot integration **just sends links to
tweets**; the pretty inline previews of tweets are generated by the
Twitter card rendering integration configured in
`/etc/zulip/settings.py` on the Zulip server.