Posting to Twitter using PHP

Jan 20, 2007 · 2 minute read

Please note that Twitter no-longer support Basic Auth via the API so the following code no longer works. Please see the official docs for more info

Like others I’ve found myself becoming something of a fan of Twitter, the impossible to explain social networking site. If you’re reading this, have a twitter account and not already my friend then add me if you like.

Apart from the interesting social aspects I’m also interested in Twitter as an API for all sorts of communications, remember Twitter already deals nicely with SMS messaging, Instant Messaging, subscription and the like and has a nice XML and JSON based API. I’ve been using the Zamano SMS gateway at work for a few projects and Twitter actually lets me some more and doesn’t come with a price tag.

I started out playing with curl to send updates like so (obviously with a real username and password):

curl -u username:password -d status="twittering from curl" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml I then used the PHP curl features to do the same thing from PHP:

<?php
    // Set username and password
    $username = 'username';
    $password = 'password';
    // The message you want to send
    $message = 'is twittering from php using curl';
    // The twitter API address
    $url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml';
    // Alternative JSON version
    // $url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json';
    // Set up and execute the curl process
    $curl_handle = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");
    curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
    curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=$message");
    curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
    $buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
    curl_close($curl_handle);
    // check for success or failure
    if (empty($buffer)) {
        echo 'message';
    } else {
        echo 'success';
    }
    ?>

Obviously you could do more with the return than print out a success or failure message. The $buffer variable has the returned XML or JSON for you’re parsing pleasure.

I’m going to try out some of the other API methods too, probably play more with XSL or look more closely at the PEAR JSON module in building up a simple library as a quick search didn’t throw up much of interest and the API is nice and simple; making it fun to hack on.

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Posting to Twitter using PHP