Tweeting from a singular, other account

[Mipsylicious]

Howdy, I just got authorized for a dev account (woot!) so I’m still learning the ropes here. The use case I outlined for my app is that it would reply with relevant data when it was “mentioned”. However, given how keys and secrets work on the app, currently this would be done with my main Twitter account. I would like a separate, bot account to be the one making the tweets so that I can keep my own account for myself. I applied for the developer account using my main account as I wanted a central location to manage all of my apps should I choose to make more in the future, but perhaps I went about it the wrong way and should have applied on the bot’s account? I was wondering whether there is a way (or possibly the preferred way) to Tweet from another account. I have found information in the documentation for multiple users but in this case a single account will be used so I’m not sure whether I should handle it in a similar way or if there is something cleaner which you would suggest.

I’m not sure how clearly that thought came out, so in short: I want to tweet from a different account. Is there a nice way or did I mess up?

I would be happy to provide any additional information and thank you in advance!

[LeBraat]

Hello @Mipsylicious,

Thanks for writing in!

Posting Tweets from an account other than the one that you have an approved developer account is definitely possible. There is one strategy that you can follow without having to create a new developer account with your bot profile:

Use the Sign in with Twitter functionality to authorize your personal account to be able to post on behalf of your bot account.

Once you have authorized your bot account, you will be able to use the tokens that you receive through that process to post using the statuses/update endpoint.

You will likely want to use the statuses/mention_timeline endpoint for this use case as well.

Let me know if you have any additional questions!

[Mipsylicious]

Howdy @LeBraat,

I wanted to try it out before I got back to you. It seems to be working great, thanks! I’m using Tweepy so I’m not using raw endpoints but thank you for the information! I have a few more questions but most of them are unrelated to this thread so I’ll put them in a different post to not make off-topic comments. One on-topic question I do have is that I didn’t see a refresh token or anything of the sort when getting the access token from the authenticated user. Tweepy’s documentation states that the tokens do not expire unless the user revokes the app’s privileges on their account. I just wanted to confirm that this is true, that I only need to do this once (or when cycling keys), and that I don’t need to routinely refresh in any way. Is this correct?

Thanks again for the help!

[LeBraat]

I have a few more questions but most of them are unrelated to this thread so I’ll put them in a different post to not make off-topic comments.

Thank you for staying on-topic!

One on-topic question I do have is that I didn’t see a refresh token or anything of the sort when getting the access token from the authenticated user. Tweepy’s documentation states that the tokens do not expire unless the user revokes the app’s privileges on their account. I just wanted to confirm that this is true, that I only need to do this once (or when cycling keys), and that I don’t need to routinely refresh in any way. Is this correct?

Access tokens will expire if a user revokes the app’s privileges, if the user changes their password, or if the user regenerates their access tokens via the app management dashboard. You shouldn’t have to refresh, but do make sure that – if a user changes their password – that they can easily go through the sign in with Twitter process again to provide you access to their tokens.

[Mipsylicious]

@LeBraat

Yup, that makes sense. At this time and for this app it doesn’t seem like I’ll be doing anything with other accounts other than one I own so this should not be a problem but I’ll keep these points in mind if I make a multi-user app in the future. Thank you!

[LeBraat]

Glad I could help!

[system]

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