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mehulved edited this page Sep 13, 2010 · 6 revisions

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  1. What is chirp
    1. What is twitter
  2. Inspiration
  3. Obtaining Chirp
    1. Download Using Git
    2. Download Tarballs
  4. Chirp Installation
    1. Dependencies
    2. Chirprc
    3. Install chirp
  5. Using Chirp
    1. Options
    2. Post messages
    3. View timeline
    4. View DM
  6. Roadmap
  7. I want to help in chirp development
    1. What is the programming language used for chirp
    2. Twitter API
    3. How to use git
    4. Where do I report bugs?



What is Chirp

Chirp is a command line twitter client. It allows you to view timeline & Direct Messages and post messages on twitter.

What is twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging website. People interact with each other to answer the question “What are you doing?” within 140 word limit per post. Twitter is becoming increasingly popular with marketing people, techies, news channels and several celebrities. Other people are also catching up with twitter at a rapid pace.

Inspiration

Obtaining Chirp

There are no packaged releases for chirp yet. Either checkout using git, or download a tarball of the latest snapshot.

Download Using Git

Open a terminal window and type the following command

git clone git://github.com/sykora/chirp.git

It will create a directory git in your current directory and will download the source code in the git directory.

Download Tarballs

Select ‘master’ under the branches tab of chirp’s source code and click ‘Download’.

Chirp Installation

To install chirp, first step is to check if you have proper dependencies installed on your system, followed by configuring the chirprc file and then install the chirp files to your PATH variable.

Dependencies

Chirp needs the following dependencies

  • python – Python should come installed with most linux distributions. If you do not have python installed, install it from your package manager or get the sources from here
  • python-twitter – python-twitter is a python module used to develop this software, get it from here
    Now that you have got dependencies and installed them, you are ready to configure chirp for use.

Chirprc

This file which stores information regarding your username and password. It is needed for logging in to twitter. A sample chirprc is provided, just edit it username and password fields as below


username = your_twitter_username

password = your_twitter_password

After making the changes, save the file as .chirprc in your home directory. Do not forget to change the file permission so that it is readable only by the user. To do this, type the following command in the terminal


chmod 400 ~/.chirprc

You are now ready to install chirp on your system

Install chirp

First change your working directory to chirp


cd chirp

Then type the following commands to install chirp in your /usr/bin directory


su -c “install chirp /usr/bin”

In case of your distribution does not allow su, instead allows sudo, use the following command


sudo install chirp /usr/bin

Congratulations! Chirp is now installed on your system. You can now run it from command line. Check the next section for the syntax.

Using Chirp

Chirp provides capabilities to view user timeline, user’s DM and post messages.

Options

chirp -c

-c switch toggles color on. So, if your terminal supports colours then you can use this switch to display colours.

chirp -u username

-u switch is used to provide username. This is useful incase you do not have the chirprc file or want to use a different username. This option is used with another switch -p that follows
chirp -p password

-p switch is used to provide password. This is useful incase you do not have the chirprc file or want to supply a different password. This option is used with the above switch -u

Post messages

chirp post

Post option is used to post messages. After typing the above command you have to type your message on the blank line and press Ctrl + D (EOF character).

Note: In case of bash, you need to press Enter(EOL character) before you can use Ctrl + D (EOF character).

View timeline

chirp list handle

This will list all messages from the user with the username as handle.

View DM

chirp direct

This will list all the direct messages. This feature is still under progress and does not work as of now.

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