Downloading Twitter Direct Message Attachments

[siwalik]

I’m using twitter’s newly introduced events endpoints to poll direct messages for my user [ doc link ]

Let’s take any sample incoming dm, which has an attachment. The JSON looks something like this =>

[ link to JSON ]

I want to download the media at “media_url_https” but couldn’t find an appropriate API documentation for Media download anywhere in the twitter documentation.

On further digging, seems like inspite of having the access_token and secret of the user, I have to make a separate ‘3-legged-authentication’ for accessing the media because of the TON (Twitter Object Nest) API being used in the link (ton.twitter.com/…) whose documentation again doesn’t provide a download example. [ TON API doc ]

So What is the correct way to download a DM attachment from the link provided?
What I’m already having? link, access token, secret, consumer key and secret.

[siwalik]

Okay, I figured it out, so here’s my current implementation.

Nevertheless, this issue may be something really simple and I might have overthought stuffs, but if I did, god knows how many else may end up doing the same! So please can we make the twitter doc. more discreet and clear regarding the attachment auth/handling/download part?

import * as request from 'request';
import * as fs from 'fs';

if (DM.message_create.message_data.attachment) {
  const url = DM.message_create.message_data.attachment.media.media_url_https;
  const fileExtention = url.match('\.[^.\\/:*?"<>|\r\n]+$')[0];
  const outh = {
    consumer_key: your_consumer_key,
    consumer_secret: your_consumer_secret,
    token: user_token,
    token_secret: user_token_secret,
  };
  const requestOptions = { url, oauth };
  request.get(requestOptions)
    .pipe(fs.createWriteStream(`image${fileExtention}`))
    .on('close', () => {
      console.log('Download complete.');
    });

}

[LeBraat]

Noted on the documentation recommendation. I will make sure that we get around to this.

[LeBraat]