Obtaining and using access tokens

1. Browser-based authentication

• Authentication via web browser requires the httpuv package to be installed.

## install httpuv if not already
if (!requireNamespace("httpuv", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("httpuv")
}

• Click the tab labeled Keys and Access Tokens to retrieve your keys.

• In the Keys and Access Tokens tab, locate the values Consumer Key (aka “API Key”) and Consumer Secret (aka “API Secret”).

• Copy and paste the two keys (along with the name of your app) into an R script file and pass them along to create_token().

## autheticate via web browser
token <- create_token(
  app = "rtweet_token",
  consumer_key = "XYznzPFOFZR2a39FwWKN1Jp41",
  consumer_secret = "CtkGEWmSevZqJuKl6HHrBxbCybxI1xGLqrD5ynPd9jG0SoHZbD")

• A browser window should pop up. Click to approve (must be signed into twitter.com) and return to R.

• The create_token() function should automatically save your token as an environment variable for you. To make sure it worked, compare the created token object to the object returned by get_token()

## check to see if the token is loaded
identical(twitter_token, get_token())

2. Access token/secret method

• Click the tab labeled Keys and Access Tokens to retrieve your keys.

• In the Keys and Access Tokens tab, locate and copy/paste values Consumer Key (aka “API Key”) and Consumer Secret (aka “API Secret”) into an R script.

• In the Keys and Access Tokens tab, scroll down to Token Actions and click Create my access token.

• That should generate two access keys Access Token and Access Token Secret

• Locate and copy/paste Access Token and Access Token Secret (fake keys shown in image above) into an R script file

## authenticate via access token
token <- create_token(
  app = "my_twitter_research_app",
  consumer_key = "XYznzPFOFZR2a39FwWKN1Jp41",
  acess_token = "9551451262-wK2EmA942kxZYIwa5LMKZoQA4Xc2uyIiEwu2YXL",
  access_secret = "9vpiSGKg1fIPQtxc5d5ESiFlZQpfbknEN1f1m2xe5byw7")

• Once the keys are read into R, pass the objects to create_token(), and store the output as twitter_token.

## create token and save it as an environment variable
twitter_token <- create_token(
  app = appname,
  consumer_key = key,
  consumer_secret = secret,
  access_token = access_token,
  access_secret = access_secret
)

• The create_token() function should automatically save your token as an environment variable for you. To make sure it worked, compare the created token object to the object returned by get_token()

## check to see if the token is loaded
identical(twitter_token, get_token())

That’s it!