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A Java-based tool to export tweets from Twitter for safe keeping
So, I was looking into exporting all my tweets the other day, to keep a copy just in case something happened to my Twitter account.I tried exporting from Twitter (using a desktop browser as they asked on the export page), but I have so far not seen a dump of all my tweets.
I see there are other tools available for exporting Tweets, websites, but I thought to myself, why not create a simple, safe tool for exporting and safe-keeping Tweets.
So, after a bit of rummaging I found twitter4j, and started to build a Twitter export client using a text editor, a Makefile and javac/java.
However, I quickly ran into a NoClassDefFoundError, and after googling a bit, I felt an obscure-configuration-detail-headache coming on, and decided I could try to use Maven, which is mentioned on the Twitter4j website for the build process.
The Maven quickstart guide instructed me to use this command to generate a Maven project:
mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId=org.morphex.app -DartifactId=twitter-exporter -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart -DinteractiveMode=false
And after downloading some components etc. - Maven had a file hierarchy for me.
I then added the following section to pom.xml
<dependency>
<groupId>org.twitter4j</groupId>
<artifactId>twitter4j-core</artifactId>
<version>4.0.4</version>
</dependency>
To include the twitter4j components in the Maven project. I then preceeded to run "mvn package" and then entered the target directory, and with the command
java -cp ./twitter-exporter-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar org.morphex.app.App
I got the result
Hello World!
Which is what one can expect, as the project was just generated. Afterwards I created a new repository on GitHub, and uploaded the project (output of "history|grep git" in bash):
2172 git init
2173 git add pom.xml src
2175 git config --global user.email "morphex@gmail.com"
2176 git config --global user.name "Morten W. Petersen"
2177 git commit
2182 git remote add origin https://github.com/morphex/twitter-exporter.git
2183 git push -u origin master
2184 history|grep git
I started with this before I decided to blog about it, so I guess to setup the enviroment you have to run "sudo apt install maven openjdk-8-jdk openjdk-8-jre git" on Ubuntu/Debian.
The source code website for the project is here: https://github.com/morphex/twitter-exporter
[Update same day: I had to download the twitter4j jar and add it to the java command above: "java -cp ./twitter-exporter-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar:./twitter4j-core-4.0.4.jar org.morphex.app.App"]
[Update later same day: twitter4j-core-4.0.4.jar can be downloaded from http://twitter4j.org/maven2/org/twitter4j/twitter4j-core/4.0...]
[And update even later same day: twitter4j-core-4.0.6.jar can be downloaded from https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/twitter4j/twitter4j-core/... - it's necessary for the latest code to run]
[Permalink] [By morphex] [Java (Atom feed)] [30 Mar 15:19 Europe/Oslo]