Simplest PHP example for retrieving user_timeline with Twitter API version 1.1

Question 1

Because of the Twitter API 1.0 retirement as of June 11th 2013, the script below does not work anymore.

// Create curl resource 
$ch = curl_init(); 
// Set url 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/myscreenname.json?count=10"); 
// Return the transfer as a string 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
// $output contains the output string 
$output = curl_exec($ch); 
// Close curl resource to free up system resources 
curl_close($ch);

if ($output) 
{
    $tweets = json_decode($output,true);

    foreach ($tweets as $tweet)
    {
        print_r($tweet);
    }
}

How can I get the user_timeline (recent statuses) with the least code possible?

I found this: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/statuses/user_timeline but I get the following error:

"{"errors":[{"message":"Could not authenticate you","code":32}]}"

There are a lot of classes out there but after trying several none of them seem to work because of these updates at Twitter, plus some of them are pretty advanced classes with a lot of functionality that I don't really need.

What is the simplest/shortest way to get the recent user statuses with PHP?

Question 2

Important Note: As of mid-2018, the process to get twitter API tokens became a lot more bureaucratic. It has taken me over one working week to be provided a set of API tokens, and this is for an open source project for you guys and girls with over 1.2 million installations on Packagist and 1.6k stars on Github, which theoretically should be higher priority.

If you are tasked with working with the twitter API for your work, you must take this potentially extremely long wait-time into account. Also consider other social media avenues like Facebook or Instagram and provide these options, as the process for retrieving their tokens is instant.

So you want to use the Twitter v1.1 API?

Note: the files for these are on GitHub.

Version 1.0 will soon be deprecated and unauthorised requests won't be allowed. So, here's a post to help you do just that, along with a PHP class to make your life easier.

1. Create a developer account: Set yourself up a developer account on Twitter

You need to visit the official Twitter developer site and register for a developer account. This is a free and necessary step to make requests for the v1.1 API.

2. Create an application: Create an application on the Twitter developer site

What? You thought you could make unauthenticated requests? Not with Twitter's v1.1 API. You need to visit http://dev.twitter.com/apps and click the "Create Application" button.

On this page, fill in whatever details you want. For me, it didn't matter, because I just wanted to make a load of block requests to get rid of spam followers. The point is you are going to get yourself a set of unique keys to use for your application.

So, the point of creating an application is to give yourself (and Twitter) a set of keys. These are:

The consumer key
The consumer secret
The access token
The access token secret

There's a little bit of information here on what these tokens for.

3. Create access tokens: You'll need these to make successful requests

OAuth requests a few tokens. So you need to have them generated for you.

Click "create my access token" at the bottom. Then once you scroll to the bottom again, you'll have some newly generated keys. You need to grab the four previously labelled keys from this page for your API calls, so make a note of them somewhere.

4. Change access level: You don't want read-only, do you?

If you want to make any decent use of this API, you'll need to change your settings to Read & Write if you're doing anything other than standard data retrieval using GET requests.

Choose the "Settings" tab near the top of the page.

Give your application read / write access, and hit "Update" at the bottom.

You can read more about the applications permission model that Twitter uses here.

5. Write code to access the API: I've done most of it for you

I combined the code above, with some modifications and changes, into a PHP class so it's really simple to make the requests you require.

This uses OAuth and the Twitter v1.1 API, and the class I've created which you can find below.

require_once('TwitterAPIExchange.php');

/** Set access tokens here - see: https://dev.twitter.com/apps/ **/
$settings = array(
    'oauth_access_token' => "YOUR_OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN",
    'oauth_access_token_secret' => "YOUR_OAUTH_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET",
    'consumer_key' => "YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY",
    'consumer_secret' => "YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET"
);

Make sure you put the keys you got from your application above in their respective spaces.

Next you need to choose a URL you want to make a request to. Twitter has their API documentation to help you choose which URL and also the request type (POST or GET).

/** URL for REST request, see: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/ **/
$url = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/blocks/create.json';
$requestMethod = 'POST';

In the documentation, each URL states what you can pass to it. If we're using the "blocks" URL like the one above, I can pass the following POST parameters:

/** POST fields required by the URL above. See relevant docs as above **/
$postfields = array(
    'screen_name' => 'usernameToBlock', 
    'skip_status' => '1'
);

Now that you've set up what you want to do with the API, it's time to make the actual request.

/** Perform the request and echo the response **/
$twitter = new TwitterAPIExchange($settings);
echo $twitter->buildOauth($url, $requestMethod)
             ->setPostfields($postfields)
             ->performRequest();

And for a POST request, that's it!

For a GET request, it's a little different. Here's an example:

/** Note: Set the GET field BEFORE calling buildOauth(); **/
$url = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/followers/ids.json';
$getfield = '?username=J7mbo';
$requestMethod = 'GET';
$twitter = new TwitterAPIExchange($settings);
echo $twitter->setGetfield($getfield)
             ->buildOauth($url, $requestMethod)
             ->performRequest();

Final code example: For a simple GET request for a list of my followers.

$url = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/followers/list.json';
$getfield = '?username=J7mbo&skip_status=1';
$requestMethod = 'GET';
$twitter = new TwitterAPIExchange($settings);
echo $twitter->setGetfield($getfield)
             ->buildOauth($url, $requestMethod)
             ->performRequest();

I've put these files on GitHub with credit to @lackovic10 and @rivers! I hope someone finds it useful; I know I did (I used it for bulk blocking in a loop).

Also, for those on Windows who are having problems with SSL certificates, look at this post. This library uses cURL under the hood so you need to make sure you have your cURL certs set up probably. Google is also your friend.

Question 3

The user's profile image

Okay, so you want a user's profile image. You're going to need to take a look at the twitter REST API 1.1 docs. This is a list of all the different requests you can make to their API (don't worry, I'll get to how you actually do this later on).

There are multiple ways to get the user's profile image, but the most notable one is: users/show. According to the docs for this, the users/show method:

Returns a variety of information about the user specified by the required user_id or screen_name parameter. The author's most recent Tweet will be returned inline when possible.

Well, the user profile image must be in there somewhere, correct?

Let's have a look at a typical response to a request for this information, using the users/show url (we'll use my profile as an example).

I've cut off some from the bottom, because there is a lot of data to go through. Most importantly, you'll see what you require:

This is the profile_image_url key that you need to get access to.

So, how do you do all this? It's pretty simple, actually.

Authenticated Requests

As you rightly pointed out, as of June 11th 2013 you can't make unauthenticated requests, or any to the 1.0 API any more, because it has been retired. So OAuth is the way to make requests to the 1.1 API.

I wrote a post with an aim to help all you guys make authenticated requests to the 1.1 API with little to no effort.

When you use it, you'll get back the response you see above. Follow the posts instructions, step-by-step, and you can get the library here (you only need to include one file in your project).

Basically, the previous post explains that you need to do the following:

Create a twitter developer account
Get yourself a set of unique keys from twitter (4 keys in total).
Set your application to have read/write access
Include TwitterApiExchange.php (the library)
Put your keys in a $settings array
Choose your URL and request method (Post/Get) from the docs (I put the link above!)
Make the request, that's it!

A practical example

I'm going to assume you followed the step-by-step instructions in the above post (containing pretty colour pictures). Here's the code you would use to get what you want.

// Require the library file, obviously
require_once('TwitterAPIExchange.php');

// Set up your settings with the keys you get from the dev site
$settings = array(
    'oauth_access_token' => "YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN",
    'oauth_access_token_secret' => "YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET",
    'consumer_key' => "YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY",
    'consumer_secret' => "YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET"
);

// Chooose the url you want from the docs, this is the users/show
$url = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/users/show.json';
// The request method, according to the docs, is GET, not POST
$requestMethod = 'GET';

// Set up your get string, we're using my screen name here
$getfield = '?screen_name=j7mbo';

// Create the object
$twitter = new TwitterAPIExchange($settings);

// Make the request and get the response into the $json variable
$json =  $twitter->setGetfield($getfield)
                 ->buildOauth($url, $requestMethod)
                 ->performRequest();

// It's json, so decode it into an array
$result = json_decode($json);

// Access the profile_image_url element in the array
echo $result->profile_image_url;

That's pretty much it! Very simple. There's also users/lookup which effectively does the same thing, but you can:

Returns fully-hydrated user objects for up to 100 users per request, as specified by comma-separated values passed to the user_id and/or screen_name parameters.

If you ever need to get more than one user's details, use that, but as you only require one user's details, use users/show as above.

I hope that cleared things up a bit!

Question 4

Use the search API and boolean OR operator. For example here is the URL for CNN Breaking News and NPR All Things Considered:

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=from%3acnnbrk+OR+from%3anpratc

The query is URLEncoded so use Fiddler Tools -> Text Encode/Decode or your favorite tool to see that the correct format in plain text is:

q=from:cnnbrk+OR+from:npratc

Hope that helps.

Question 5

You can't store the OAuth tokens in cache and to more than 1 request with it, as OAuth is there to help make the system secure, your "oauth_token" will contain some unique data, this token will only be able to make one call back to twitter, as soon as the call was made, that "oauth_token" is no longer valid, and the OAuth class should request a new "oauth_token", thus making sure that every call that was made is secure.

That is why you are getting an "401 unauthorized" error on the second time as the token is no longer valid.

twitter is still using OAuth v1 (v2 is still in the draft process even though facebook and google already implemented it in some parts) The image below describes the flow of the OAuth authentication. Hope it helps.

A while ago I used this to connect to twitter and send tweets, just note that it did make use of some Zend classes as the project was running on a zend server.

require_once 'Zend/Service/Twitter.php';
class Twitter {

    protected $_username = '<your_twitter_username>';
    protected $_token = '<your_twitter_access_token>';
    protected $_secret = '<your_twitter_access_token_secret>';
    protected $_twitter = NULL;

    //class constructor
    public function __construct() {
        $this->getTwitter();
    }

    //singleton twitter object   
    protected function getTwitter() {
        if (null === $this->_twitter) {
            $accessToken = new Zend_Oauth_Token_Access;
            $accessToken->setToken($this->_token)
                    ->setTokenSecret($this->_secret);

            $this->_twitter = new Zend_Service_Twitter(array(
                        'username' => $this->_username,
                        'accessToken' => $accessToken,
                    ));

            $response = $this->_twitter->account->verifyCredentials();
            if ($response->isError()) {
                throw new Zend_Exception('Provided credentials for Twitter log writer are wrong');
            }
        }
        return $this->_twitter;
    }

    //send a status message to twitter
    public function update( $tweet ) {
        $this->getTwitter()->status->update($tweet);
    }

}

Question 6

You will have to make a call to the YouTube data API's video resource after you make the search call. You can put up to 50 video IDs in a search, so you won't have to call it for each element.

https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videos/list

You'll want to set part=contentDetails, because the duration is there.

For example, the following call:

https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?id=9bZkp7q19f0&part=contentDetails&key={YOUR_API_KEY}

Gives this result:

{
 "kind": "youtube#videoListResponse",
 "etag": ""XlbeM5oNbUofJuiuGi6IkumnZR8/ny1S4th-ku477VARrY_U4tIqcTw"",
 "items": [
  {

   "id": "9bZkp7q19f0",
   "kind": "youtube#video",
   "etag": ""XlbeM5oNbUofJuiuGi6IkumnZR8/HN8ILnw-DBXyCcTsc7JG0z51BGg"",
   "contentDetails": {
    "duration": "PT4M13S",
    "dimension": "2d",
    "definition": "hd",
    "caption": "false",
    "licensedContent": true,
    "regionRestriction": {
     "blocked": [
      "DE"
     ]
    }
   }
  }
 ]
}

The time is formatted as an ISO 8601 string. PT stands for Time Duration, 4M is 4 minutes, and 13S is 13 seconds.

Simplest PHP example for retrieving user_timeline with Twitter API version 1.1

Answers

So you want to use the Twitter v1.1 API?

The user's profile image

Authenticated Requests

A practical example

php,twitter