Problem
The problem is that Twitter has removed support for RSS in their APIs. You used to be able to subscribe to your Twitter lists via RSS by simply using this URL convention: https://api.twitter.com/1/screen_name/lists/list_name/statuses.rss
Fortunately, they have not removed support for output to JSON. However, RSS readers cannot subscribe to JSON feeds.
Solution
twitter-json-to-rss is a PHP script that you install on your public facing server that allows you to get around this problem.
Installation
- Make sure you have a web server capable of running PHP 5.3+ scripts.
- Put all the files included here in a web folder of your choice.
- Create a Twitter app from: https://developer.twitter.com/
- Make note of your: Consumer key, Consumer secret, Access token (user token), Access token secret (user secret)
- Edit the twitter_auth.php script to include the Twitter OAuth information from your Twitter App.
Installation for v2
- The Twitter API v1.1 endpoints will be removed in 2022. The folder "v2" contains revised code to access the newer Twitter API v2 endpoints.
- Edit the twitter_auth.php script in the "v2" folder to include the Twitter OAuth information from your Twitter App.
- Use composer to install the required Oauth library from https://github.com/abraham/twitteroauth
- Copy the "vendor" folder that composer has built for you into the "v2" folder.
Usage (v1)
On your favorite RSS reader application, you can subscribe to a user's timeline: http://[server_name]/[path]/twitter_json_to_rss.php?screen_name=[user_name]
To subscribe to a user's list, add the list_name parameter: http://[server_name]/[path]/twitter_json_to_rss.php?screen_name=[user_name]&list_name=[list_name]
To subscribe to a hashtag feed, use a "q" parameter: http://[server_name]/[path]/twitter_json_to_rss.php?q=[searchstring] Note: if you want to specify a hashtag, url-encode it (= %23 instead of #). For instance, to search on a "#design" hashtag, the searchstring is "%23design".
For example, you can try one of the Twitter lists that I subscribe to: http://thomasyung.com/twitter_rss/twitter_json_to_rss.php?screen_name=thomasyung&list_name=mobiledev
Usage (v2)
Subscribe to tweets from a user's timeline: http://[server_name]/[path]/v2/twitter_json_to_rss.php?user_name=[user_name]
Subscribe to tweets from a user's list: http://[server_name]/[path]/v2/twitter_json_to_rss.php?list_id=[list_id]
Subscribe to all tweets matching a specific search query: http://[server_name]/[path]/v2/twitter_json_to_rss.php?query=[searchstring]
Subscribe to all tweets matching a specific hashtag: http://[server_name]/[path]/v2/twitter_json_to_rss.php?query=[hashtag]&hashtag=true NOTE A: Do not include the "#" symbol in the query parameter. E.g. To search for #wwdc, set the querystring to: "?query=wwdc&hashtag=true" NOTE B: To filter tweets matching a specific language, use the "lang" parameter. E.g. for Spanish "?query=wwdc&hashtag=true&lang=es"
Update (June 13, 2013)
- Twitter removed v1.0 of their API and are forcing all v1.1 API requests via OAuth and SSL. In short, no more public access to the JSON APIs. To get around this, we now have to do some extra setup to get our twitter-json-to-rss PHP script to work.
- We will now use tmhOAuth PHP scripts to act as an SSL OAuth proxy.
Update (June 20, 2013)
- I've now included the tmhOAuth from https://github.com/themattharris/tmhOAuth and included it in this distribution.
- I've also deprecated the twitter_list_json_to_rss.php but I have kept it in this distribution in case people are still using it in their RSS subscriptions. Instead, you should be using twitter_json_to_rss.php
- The twitter_list_json.php and twitter_json.php will output JSON in case you need to consume them publicly in another application.
Update (December 5, 2021) The Twitter API v1.1 endpoints will be sunset in 2022. See the installation and usage instructions for using the new PHP scripts updated for the Twitter API v2.