.. _getting_started:


***************
Getting started
***************

Introduction
============

If you are new to Tweepy, this is the place to begin. The goal of this
tutorial is to get you set-up and rolling with Tweepy. We won't go
into too much detail here, just some important basics.

Hello Tweepy
============

.. code-block :: python

   import tweepy

   auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
   auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)

   api = tweepy.API(auth)
   
   public_tweets = api.home_timeline()
   for tweet in public_tweets:
       print(tweet.text)

This example will download your home timeline tweets and print each
one of their texts to the console. Twitter requires all requests to
use OAuth for authentication.
The :ref:`auth_tutorial` goes into more details about authentication.

API
===

The API class provides access to the entire twitter RESTful API
methods. Each method can accept various parameters and return
responses. For more information about these methods please refer to
:ref:`API Reference <api_reference>`.

Models
======

When we invoke an API method most of the time returned back to us will
be a Tweepy model class instance. This will contain the data returned
from Twitter which we can then use inside our application. For example
the following code returns to us a User model::

   # Get the User object for twitter...
   user = api.get_user('twitter')

Models contain the data and some helper methods which we can then
use::

   print(user.screen_name)
   print(user.followers_count)
   for friend in user.friends():
      print(friend.screen_name)

For more information about models please see ModelsReference.

