twitter-mirror

Mirror the tweets of a Twitter user to Mastodon.

Configuration

To run this tool, you'll need one Twitter account and at least one Mastodon account.

Twitter

You'll need a free Twitter developer account. Follow these instructions to setup your access to the Twitter API.

This will give you an API key and API secret. You'll need to store the key and secret in environment variables for the shell instance running twitter-mirror.py script (e.g., export API_KEY=<my Twitter API key>). If you're running the script through cron, you can probably (depending on the version of cron your OS uses) set the variables in your crontab like this:

API_KEY=<my Twitter API key>
API_SECRET=<my Twitter API secret>

# Runs twitter-mirror python script every 10 minutes
*/10 * * * * root cd /var/www/twitter-mirror/; python3 twitter-mirror.py >> /var/log/cron/twitter-mirror.log 2>&1

Mastodon

You'll need a Mastodon account for each Twitter user you want to mirror. Follow these steps:

1. Create a Mastodon account, on any Mastodon server.
2. Go to the Preferences page.
3. Open the Development tab.
4. Press the New application button.
5. Provide a name for the application (e.g. "twitter-mirror").
6. Use the default scopes or limit it to the minimum required scopes: write:media, write:statuses.
7. Press SUBMIT.
   • You will be returned to the Development tab and you should now see your newly created application.
8. Select your application.
9. Note the value of your "access token"

Configuring users

With your Twitter and Mastodon accounts setup, you'll need to provide this information to the twitter-mirror service. As mentioned above, the Twitter credentials are provided through environment variables (API_KEY and API_SECRET).

For each Mastodon account that you want to post to, you'll need to provide the necessary information in the users database table. Each row will need to be provided the Twitter user ID (twitter_id), the name of the Mastodon instance being posted to (mastodon_instance), and the access token for posting to the correct Mastodon account (mastodon_token).

e.g.:

INSERT INTO users (twitter_id, mastodon_instance, mastodon_token)
    VALUES (123456789, 'mstdn.ca', '2abcDEf_ghIJkLMNopqRstuV_W90xy8ZAb1cd-6EF3G')

Latest tweet

For each configured user, twitter-mirror keeps track of the ID of the last tweet mirrored from the account in the users database table, in the most_recent_tweet column. For a new user, you can either populate this property with the ID that you would like or twitter-mirror will first request all tweets from that day and then initialize the most_recent_tweet based on that first request.