Authenticating a Twitter Feed for OAuth API V1.1 - Timelines & streams

18 February, 2013 by Tom Elliott

This tutorial is designed to help anyone who is using or wants to create a custom Twitter feed that needs to authenticate basic read-only access for any public user timeline with Twitter OAuth, API V1.1.

API V1.1 has been around for a while now but as of March 5th 2013 June 11th 2013, it will be is now depreciated and phased out. All existing V1 access paths (or ‘endpoints’) will be are now turned off – so if you’re requesting tweets from a link that looks similar to http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/username.json then you will want to migrate to 1.1 as soon as possible. For more information checkout options for using Twitter API 1.1

There are two steps to the OAuth authentication process.

1. Setup an application at Twitter dev centre and get a bunch of keys.
2. Make a server-side call to the 1.1 Twitter feed, using these keys to authenticate. I’ll be using the PHP library twitteroauth by @abraham but there are other libraries available

Step 1 – Setup a Twitter Application

This process is straightforward and you should have a set of keys within a few minutes.

1. Visit https://dev.twitter.com/apps/ and sign in using your Twitter username and password. This doesn’t have to be the username or password of the stream you need access to, just a Twitter account you control.
2. Select ‘Create new application’ and enter the application details.
   1. The name and description can be anything you like really, but you can’t use ‘Twitter’ in the name.
   2. The website field can be your main website and doesn’t have to be the site where your Twitter feed or feeds are located.
   3. Callback URL can be left blank
3. Enter the CAPTCHA info and click create
4. On the next details screen, click ‘create my access token’. You may need to refresh the page after a few seconds if it doesn’t appear automatically.
5. Make a note of the Consumer key, Consumer secret, Access token and Access token secret as highlighted below.

Once you have an app setup within Twitter, this can be used for multiple user timelines on multiple websites – you do not need to setup one app per Twitter account or user timeline. Rate limits are set to 180 requests per 15 minute window however, per access token.

Step 2 – Authenticate the Twitter Feed

First off, head over to https://github.com/abraham/twitteroauth download the oauth files here. Update 15/01/15: The latest version of twitteroauth from the previously mentioned github link uses Composer. As I don’t want to ask everyone to setup/install Composer on their servers, I’ve provided the link to an older version of the library which should work fine. Just check the relative path to twitteroauth.php when setting up the PHP

You’re only going to need to use a handful of the twitteroauth files for this basic authentication but you might as well download the whole library. A key advantage of doing all this in PHP instead of JavaScript is that your access tokens and keys are sent server side and not visible to the client. This is also recommended by Twitter.

Next, create a new php file, e.g. get-tweets1.1.php and use the following PHP code, substituting the 4 keys, twitter username and number of tweets you want to display. Upload this file along with the twitteroauth library to a folder on your web server and test the get tweets file.

The PHP:

<?php
session_start();
require_once("twitteroauth/twitteroauth/twitteroauth.php"); //Path to twitteroauth library

$twitteruser = "twitterusername";
$notweets = 30;
$consumerkey = "12345";
$consumersecret = "123456789";
$accesstoken = "123456789";
$accesstokensecret = "12345";

function getConnectionWithAccessToken($cons_key, $cons_secret, $oauth_token, $oauth_token_secret) {
  $connection = new TwitterOAuth($cons_key, $cons_secret, $oauth_token, $oauth_token_secret);
  return $connection;
}

$connection = getConnectionWithAccessToken($consumerkey, $consumersecret, $accesstoken, $accesstokensecret);

$tweets = $connection->get("https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=".$twitteruser."&count=".$notweets);

echo json_encode($tweets);
?>

Hooray! you should have the latest tweets displaying in .json format. There should be a load of information displayed for each tweet within an array of information – it might look like a random mess but this is what you can now use to create a custom styled feed.

Check out my jQuery article if you want to create a custom twitter feed or my fading tweets post if you want to animate tweets one at a time. If you want to create a custom twitter search instead of a user timeline feed, see my Twitter search tutorial

You could of course get tweets to output direct from PHP as HTML but .json format and the articles above should be useful for anyone migrating from API V1 JavaScript Twitter feeds.

The above authentication code can also be easily modified for different Twitter endpoints, such as retrieving favorite tweets.

Troubleshooting tip 1: If you are getting internal 500 server errors on the twitter feed, this could be down to a number of things. Try enabling friendly PHP display errors or checking log files to see the exact error message. The most common mistake is an incorrect path to the twitteroauth.php file. Depending how the library is unzipped, it’s likely that the path will be “twitteroauth/twitteroauth/twitteroauth.php” or “twitteroauth/twitteroauth.php”. Use a relative path and not an absolute path, relative to where you put your get tweets file

Troubleshooting tip 2: Make sure you have cURL enabled on your server setup which is required by the Twitter OAuth library

Troubleshooting tip 3: If you’re getting a blank page, again, make sure you’re using a relative path to the OAuth library and ensure you have no HTML outside the opening and closing PHP

Troubleshooting tip 4: If you’re seeing a ‘null’ response, check the $connection->get call. I’ve seen null errors occur when trying to migrate old V1 calls that include a ‘callback’ parameter.

‘null’ responses when trying to authenticate Twitter also appear when using an earlier version of PHP – version 5.2.x. Try upgrading to a more recent version of PHP if possible or check your php.ini file and remove ‘curl_exec’ from ‘disable_functions’ if it exists. (thanks to Daniel Iftimie for this last one)

Troubleshooting tip 5: If the only thing you see is the get(); line and viewing page source shows the entire PHP, this means PHP isn’t activated on your server and your get tweets script isn’t being executed.

Note: The new rate limits for V1.1 for user timelines are 180 requests per 15 minute window. IP Address based limited no longer applies as it did with non-authenticated requests. So if you have a high volume of visitors to your website, or want to use the same access tokens across multiple sites and different twitter feeds then it’s probably worth setting up scheduled caching of tweets.

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Related posts

Creating a Custom jQuery Twitter Feed (API v1.1) »
Creating a Twitter Search & Analytics tool »

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