Geotweet: fetch geolocalized tweets and plot them on a map

This software fetches geolocalized tweets from the Twitter Streaming APIs, shows them on the terminal and draws their location on a world map. It's based on tweepy and matplotlib.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.6
• the geos library must be installed on the system

This software is tested on Mac OS 10.13.3 and Ubuntu 17.10.

Installation

This guide assumes you have a working setup of Python 3.6.

• install geos library

  brew install geos              # Mac OS
  sudo apt install libgeos-c1v5  # Ubuntu 17.10

• create a Python virtual environment and activate it (assuming Bash as shell)

  python3.6 -m venv geotweet_venv
  source geotweet_venv/bin/activate

• clone this repository and cd into it

  git clone https://github.com/sanjioh/geotweet
  cd geotweet

• install requirements (this can take long, since the basemap library is ~130MB)

  pip install -r requirements.txt

• install Geotweet

  pip install .

Usage

usage: geotweet [-h] [--min-long MIN_LONG] [--min-lat MIN_LAT]
                [--max-long MAX_LONG] [--max-lat MAX_LAT]
                consumer_key consumer_secret access_token access_token_secret

Fetch geolocalized tweets and plot them on a map.

positional arguments:
consumer_key         Twitter Application Consumer Key
consumer_secret      Twitter Application Consumer Secret
access_token         Twitter User Access Token
access_token_secret  Twitter User Access Token Secret

optional arguments:
-h, --help           show this help message and exit
--min-long MIN_LONG  Minimum longitude (default: -180)
--min-lat MIN_LAT    Minimum latitude (default: -90)
--max-long MAX_LONG  Maximum longitude (default: 180)
--max-lat MAX_LAT    Maximum latitude (default: 90)

Example

$ geotweet <consumer_key> <consumer_secret> <access_token> <access_token_secret> \
  --min-lat -70 --max-lat 80 --min-long -150 --max-long 120

Tests

Simply run tox from the repository root.

Notes

• this project uses an src directory layout to prevent packaging errors and to enforce testing against a pip-installed copy of the program (as opposed to the one in the current working directory)¹²
• this program is single-threaded synchronous, so expect the map to appear frozen when tweets aren't flowing

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1. https://hynek.me/articles/testing-packaging/↩

2. https://blog.ionelmc.ro/2014/05/25/python-packaging/↩