Getting started with Twitter\OAuth2\Python

Question

I\'m attempting to connect to twitter using python, and I\'m finding it really frustrating.
Everything I read suggests that I need a consumer key, a consumer secret,

Answer 1

Personally I use tweepy, it provides a nice python wrapper to Twitter's API

Answer 2

Almost all oauth examples on blogs seem to be examples of the authorisation phase of oauth and none focus on how to actually make requests once you have these, as once you understand how it works this part is quite obvious. Getting that initial understanding is quite difficult unfortunately.

If you're just trying access your twitter account from a script or app for yourself you can get the access token (called key in the python oauth library) and secret from dev.twitter.com at the bottom of the settings page for your app under the heading Your access token.

import oauth2 as oauth
import json

CONSUMER_KEY = "your app's consumer key"
CONSUMER_SECRET = "your app's consumer secret"
ACCESS_KEY = "your access token"
ACCESS_SECRET = "your access token secret"

consumer = oauth.Consumer(key=CONSUMER_KEY, secret=CONSUMER_SECRET)
access_token = oauth.Token(key=ACCESS_KEY, secret=ACCESS_SECRET)
client = oauth.Client(consumer, access_token)

timeline_endpoint = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/home_timeline.json"
response, data = client.request(timeline_endpoint)

tweets = json.loads(data)
for tweet in tweets:
    print tweet['text']

This example is using the python lib python-oauth2, which is an unfortunately named OAuth library not an OAuth2 library.

If you want to actually let other people authorise their account to be used by your app then you need to implement the redirect dance where you ask twitter for a request token/secret pair and then redirect the user to the twitter authorize page with this request token, they sign in and authorize the token and get redirected back to your application, you then exchange the request token for an access token and secret pair which you can store and use to make requests like above.

The Twitter Three-legged OAuth Example in the Readme at http://github.com/simplegeo/python-oauth2 seems to cover what needs to be done