Twittcher (for twitter-watcher) is a Python module to make bots that will watch a Twitter user page or search page, and react to the tweets they find.

It's simple, small (currently ~150 lines of code), and doesn't require any registration on Twitter or dev.twitter.com, as it doesn't depend on the Twitter API (instead it parses the HTML).

Twittcher is an open-source software originally written by Zulko, and released under the MIT licence. The project is hosted on Github, where you can report bugs, propose improvements, etc.

If you have pip, install twittcher by typing in a terminal:

(sudo) pip install twittcher

Else, download the sources (on Github or PyPI), and in the same directory as the setup.py file, type this in a terminal:

(sudo) python setup.py install

Twittcher requires the Python package BeautifulSoup (a.k.a. bs4), which will be automatically installed when twittcher is installed.

There is currently no documentation for Twittcher, but the following examples should show you everything you need to get started.

Every 120 seconds, print all the new tweets by John D. Cook:

from twittcher import UserWatcher
UserWatcher("JohnDCook").watch_every(120)

Result:

Kicking off some simulations before I quit work for the day. #dejavu
  Author: JohnDCook
  Date: 15:43 - 24 juil. 2014
  Link: https://twitter.com/JohnDCook/status/492440083073859585
“Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." -- John F. Kennedy,
  Author: JerryWeinberg
  Date: 13:18 - 24 juil. 2014
  Link: https://twitter.com/JerryWeinberg/status/492403371975114752

The default action of UserWatcher is to print the tweets, but you can ask any other action instead. For instance, here is how to only print the tweets that are actually written by John D. Cook (not the ones he retweets):

from twittcher import UserWatcher

def my_action(tweet):
    if tweet.username == "JohnDCook":
        print(tweet)

UserWatcher("JohnDCook", action=my_action).watch_every(120)

Every 60 seconds, for any of my new tweets of the form cmd: my_command, run my_command in a terminal. Using simple tweets I can control any distant computer running this script.

import subprocess
from twittcher import UserWatcher

def my_action(tweet):
    """ Execute the tweet's command, if any. """
    if tweet.text.startswith("cmd: "):
        subprocess.Popen( tweet.text[5:], shell=True )

# Watch my account and react to my tweets
bot = UserWatcher("Zulko___", action=my_action)
bot.watch_every(60)

For instance, the tweet cmd: firefox will open Firefox on the computer, and the tweet cmd: echo "Hello" will have the computer print Hello in a terminal.

Every 20 seconds, send me all the new tweets in the Twitter search results for chocolate milk.

from twittcher import TweetSender, SearchWatcher
sender = TweetSender(smtp="smtp.gmail.com", port=587,
                     login="[email protected]",
                     password="fibo112358", # be nice, don't try.
                     to_addrs="[email protected]", # where to send
                     sender_id = "chocolate milk")
bot = SearchWatcher("chocolate milk", action=sender.send)
bot.watch_every(20)

If you want to run several bots at once, make sure that you leave a few seconds between the requests of the different bots. Here is how you print the new tweets of John D. Cook, Mathbabe, and Eolas. Each of them is watched every minute, with 20 seconds between the requests of two bots:

import time
import itertools
from twittcher import UserWatcher

bots = [ UserWatcher(user) for user in
         ["JohnDCook", "mathbabedotorg",  "Maitre_Eolas"]]

for bot in itertools.cycle(bots):
    bot.watch()
    time.sleep(20)

A bot can save to a file the tweets that it has already seen, so that in future sessions it will remember not to process these tweets again, in case they still appear on the watched page.

from twittcher import SearchWatcher
bot = SearchWatcher("chocolate milk", database="choco.db")
bot.watch_every(20)