How do I use Twitter's API to fetch tweets from someone's timeline ? (problems with authentication !)

Question

So I'm trying to get the latest tweets posted by a user using a PHP script (and caching the results into a text file). I'm using the request https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?count=5&screen_name=google and it's been working fine as a public client, but in order to get better control over my API hit limit I need to authenticate my requests.

I've tried the method shown at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/application-only-auth , but after I successfully connect I get the error "Your credentials do not allow access to this resource" (why ?). So I've tried to use the OAuth method (which looks frighteningly complicated for a hobbyist like me), and downloaded the TwitterOAuth library . But I'm still having trouble connecting ! I put my credentials in the config.php file, but I have no idea where to go from there. The documentation seems to be hinting that I need to manually login to Twitter to authorize the application's connection token... or something. Apparently I need to redirect to some callback URL (what even ?!) and get a short-term connection to enable a long-term connection password which I have to store for later ? What is this madness ?

I was initially under the impression that I could just fetch data from Twitter's RSS feeds but those can't be accessed from scripts for some reason (unlike the Google News RSS feed which fetches just fine). It seems I've gotten myself into something much more complicated than what I signed for. Isn't there an easier (and saner) way of doing this ? Or is nothing decidedly simple ?

I apologize for being such an easily-confused dullard, but my head is spinning.

Thanks !

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Edit : after digging around some more I decided to just use PHP curl to fetch the raw page, and then do some Xpath voodoo to get the tweets and the time they were posted at. Of course, this is CPU-intensive, far from stable, and probably not a practice that pleases the folks at Twitter; it also only returns the last 20 tweets (which is thankfully enough for my needs).

However, Cormac Driver's response below about Temboo is certainly a method I'll be investigating next time I need to do something like that.

Answer 1

Temboo provides a simple way of using OAuth to authenticate with Twitter. The process is broken down into two steps:

1. InitializeOauth . This step returns a Twitter authorization URL that Twitter account holders can visit to grant access to your script.

2. FinalizeOauth . This step returns the access token that your script will need to make authenticated requests to the Twitter API on behalf of the user.

Full details on how to do this with PHP here: https://www.temboo.com/library/Library/Twitter/OAuth/

You can see an example of how Temboo handles OAuth for Facebook on this page. The PHP source code is provided, and it's almost identical to the code you'll need to do the same thing for Twitter.

(Full disclosure: I work at Temboo)