Command line examples

This repository contains example programs for my presentation 'Command line programs for busy developers' at PyConAU 2014. Each example in the repository demonstrate the use of a different command line library.

Using the Twitter API

To use the example programs you will need to register a new client application with Twitter. To do this, login into https://dev.twitter.com/ with your Twitter account and browser to 'My Applications'. Now click 'Create New App' and complete the form. Once the application is created you will need to generate your access token from the API tab. You will have the necessary API Key, API Secret, Access Token and Access Secret necessary to continue.

The command line

All sample applications will fetch the necessary API and access tokens from the current environment. The environment variables are API_KEY, API_SECRET, ACCESS_TOKEN and ACCESS_SECRET. Alternatively the API and access tokens can be passed using command line arguments.

Each application accepts 3 sub-commands, timeline, mentions and retweets. Each of these selects a different timeline for the authenticated user and prints the last 20 tweets from it.

The programs

The following example applications demonstrate using standard library modules for command line parsing.

• tw_getopt.py, the getopt module.
• tw_optparse.py, the optparse module.
• tw_argparse.py, the argparse module.

While the following example applications demonstrate using third party packages from PyPI.

• tw_begins.py, the begins package.
• tw_click.py, the click package.
• tw_cliff.py, the cliff package.
• tw_docopt.py, the docopt package.