How to create a Twitter app

Making a bot for Twitter is a multi-step process that consists of:

• making a new Twitter account for your bot
• applying for a developer account
• creating a new Twitter app
• writing code for your bot (check out our resources for botmakers)
• hosting your bot (See the Hosting Platforms article)

Don’t get overwhelmed though, I will guide you through all this. And if you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email or ask for help in the Botmakers community.

Applying for a developer account¶

As of July 2018, you must apply for a Twitter developer account and be approved before you can create new apps on Twitter. You can start the process by going to this page with the account that will be used as your bot.

You will need to add a phone number to your account before you can proceed. If you are already using your phone number with a different Twitter account, you should be able to remove it by texting STOP to your country’s shortcode number, and add it to your new bot account.

A few people run into issues after reusing their phone number too many times, but you can also sign up for Google Voice, or any other service that lets you receive text messages (for example Skype Number doesn’t, so it won’t work).

Creating a new Twitter app¶

Once your developer account is approved, you can go to the developer dashboard and click the Create an app button to create an app for your bot.

If you’re making a bot that will respond to DMs, you will need to provide the callback URL, which should be mentioned in the tutorial you’re following. Otherwise you can skip all fields that are not required.

Once you’re done here, go to the Keys and Tokens tab and under Access token & access token secret click Create to get your API keys. These will let you make API calls, or in other words, interact with the data on Twitter’s website.

We are going to need four things from this page:

• Consumer API Key
• Consumer API Secret
• Access Token
• Access Token Secret

Also, if necessary, change the permissions on the Permissions tab to allow access to DMs with the Read, write and Access direct messages option.

And you’re done! Now go check out some Twitter bot tutorials and our starter projects on Glitch, and be sure to submit your bots to Botwiki and share them with the Botmakers community!