I recently cleaned and packed up a series of scripts that were laying around as a result of several project involving Twitter data. This software downloads potentially massive amounts of tweets based on either a list of keywords or a list of Twitter usernames.

In the first case, the script intercepts the stream of tweets, so only present tweets are returned (it uses the Twitter stream API). In the other case, the script accesses the user.timeline API to return up to ~3.200 tweets per user, starting from the moment the script is launched and going back in time.

You only need a valid Twitter API key! (and a few Python libraries…) There are options to control the rate limit, exclude retweets and control the output format.

Here’s the software github page: https://github.com/valeriobasile/twittercrawler

Have fun!