Quick free auto-post-to-Twitter PHP script in the age of Elon Musk

Right, here’s a very quick and dirty blog post about how to achieve an auto-post to Twitter; because the documentation these days is hiding behind a lot of change after Elon Musk took over and ruined it. This works as of Sep 2023.

The Twitter side

Log into the Twitter Developer Portal

You need a project, and one (and only one) project app underneath that project. Don’t worry about setting up user authentication - you can’t use it.

In “keys and settings”, you want to get four bits - the API key and secret, the access token and secret.

You’re using the v2 API, where you can ONLY create a tweet, literally nothing else, and you get 500 tweets a day.

Your PHP code

From the PHP side, you want to install abraham/twitteroauth - but once you’ve installed it, ignore the documentation because it’s no longer right.

To post a tweet, use this PHP nonsense

use Abraham\TwitterOAuth\TwitterOAuth;

//connect with your tokens
$connection = new TwitterOAuth(
  $config['twitter-consumer-key'],
  $config['twitter-consumer-secret'],
  $config['twitter-access-token'],
  $config['twitter-access-token-secret']
);

//set the API version to v2 otherwise nothing will work
$connection->setApiVersion('2');

//prepare your tweet
$text="That @jamescridland wrote a quick script and I'm using it.";

//Post your tweet
$result = $connection->post("tweets", ["text" => $text], true);

//Test that it went
if ($connection->getLastHttpCode()<299) {
	echo "BIG SUCCESS!";
} else {
	echo "MASSIVE FAIL!";
	print_r($connection);
}

And that really is it. You’ll get an ugly error if it fails with some information to help, possibly. You’ll want to catch that properly in production, right? Right.