How to Register a Twitter App in 8 Easy Steps
By 
One of the reasons that Twitter is so popular, and become what it is today, is due to the huge number of developers who have built apps over the years. Why so many developers? Basically because Twitter has been very easy to work with.
Many social networks and apps have their own interface that programmers can work with. These interfaces are called APIs (short for Application Programming Interface). Unfortunately Twitter have made quite a few changes recently which have made their API a lot more difficult to work with.
On June 11th, 2013, Twitter retired v.1 of their API and stopped offering RSS feeds. This has meant quite a few Twitter apps no longer work, and programmers have been scratching their heads, wondering what to do.
I wrote an article some time back about how to replace Twitter Triggers in IFTTT now that they’re gone. In this article I showed how you could use the RSS feeds that Twitter offered to connect with other apps using the tool IFTTT. Unfortunately from the 11th June, this no longer works- because Twitter retired RSS feeds and now requires that any Twitter app is authenticated first. This is so that Twitter can keep a close eye on the use of it’s API. This suddenly has raised the bar and made it far more complicated for developers to play with Twitter’s data
I will show you how to get your RSS feeds back as well as do some other really cool things with Twitter in a future article. However, for now, I am going to show you how to start the process off- register your Twitter app. And I am going to attempt to make this as easy to understand as possible. I hope I succeed!
#1 Visit the Twitter Developers’ Site
The first thing you need to do is head on down to dev.twitter.com. In order to create an account, all you need to do is click on the “Sign In” link at the top right.
#2 Sign in with your Twitter Account
Next, sign in with the Twitter account you want to associate with your app. You do have a Twitter account don’t you?!
#3 Go to apps.twitter.com
Once you’re logged in, you will need to visit Twitter’s app website. This can be found at apps.twitter.com (it can also be found by clicking “manage your apps” in the footer of the Twitter Developers site.
#4 Create a New Application
If you are new to the Developers site you won’t see any applications registered. Either way, it’s time to create our first application. To do this, click on the big “Create a new application” button.
#5 Fill in your Application Details
It’s been easy so far, but this screen often makes people confused. Don’t worry, it’s a lot easier than you think…
- Name:
First of all you need to give your app a unique name (one that no one else has used for their Twitter app). Since we’re going to be an creating app for personal use and not one that other people can register and use, just put your domain name in or perhaps even your name. - Description:
You don’t have to worry much about the description- you can change this later, but it can help to distinguish this app from others that you might create in the future. I’ve put “a set of Twitter tools for personal use”. - Website:
Put your website in the website field. It’s supposed to be your application’s publicly accessible home page. However, if your app is for personal use, this isn’t really applicable. I would just enter the website address where the app will be hosted. - Callback URL:
I would ignore the Callback URL field. If you are allowing users to log into your app to authenticate themselves, you’d enter the URL where they would be returned after they’ve given permission to Twitter to use your app.
Once you’ve done this, make sure you’ve read the “Developer Rules Of The Road” blurb, check the “Yes, I agree” box, fill in the CAPTCHA (don’t you just love them) and click the “create your Twitter Application” button. Hurrah!
#6 Create Your Access Token
You’ll then be presented with lots of information, but we’re not quite done yet. We now need to authorise the Twitter app for your Twitter account. To do this, click the “Create my access token” button. This takes a few seconds, so if you don’t see the access tokens on the next screen, you may have to refresh the page a few times.
This access token will allow your Twitter application to read Twitter information. You’ll be able to get data of your tweets, mentions, lists and more. However, if you want to do more advanced stuff like sending tweets or deleting, you’ll need to change your access type.
#7 Choose what Access Type You Need
As I mentioned, the default access type when you create a Twitter app is read only. My recommendation is to keep it like this unless you really want to be able to have the app delete or write data (for example sending tweets or deleting direct messages). For our first Twitter app we will only need read only access, but so that you know for future, in order to change the access type, you need to click on the settings tab at the top of the screen. Once you do this, scroll down to where it says “Application Type”. Change the access type to “Read and Write” to be able to read Twitter data and send tweets and select “Read, Write and access direct messages” if you want to also have access to your direct messages.
#8 Make a note of your OAuth Settings
Once you’ve done this, make a note of your OAuth settings. You will need these long horrible strings of characters for your Twitter app. The ones you will need are:
- Consumer Key
- Consumer Secret
- OAuth Access Token
- OAuth Access Token Secret
It goes without saying that you should keep these secret. If anyone was to get these keys, they could effectively access your Twitter account.
The Next Step- How to build your first App!
Armed with your Twitter app data, you can now go about creating your first Twitter app. I’ve written how to do just that in the next article called Build Your First Twitter App Using PHP in 8 Easy Steps. You will be able to access your tweets, mentions, direct messages and filter through them.
About Ian Anderson Gray
Ian is a Confident Live Marketing Coach and founder of Seriously Social. He’s an international speaker, trainer, teacher, web developer and consultant. He has a passion for making the techno-babble of live video and social media marketing easy to understand. Ian is co-founder of Select Performers – a family run web agency. As well as being a geek, husband, and dad to two kids, Ian is also a professional singer and lives near Manchester in the UK. Find out more
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Hi, Ian! Can you help me?
I created twitter app more than three weeks ago. Now I see only “Application under review” on https://developer.twitter.com/en/apps. Maybe I did something wrong?
Also,
step #1
link dev.twitter.com redirect to https://developer.twitter.com/
step #3
On https://apps.twitter.com/ I didn’t find “Manage Your Apps”
step #4 and so on
they prevent creating app from “Application management”
Thank you
Hi Alex, unfortunately, Twitter has changed things, and you need to sign up for a developer account. All apps then need to be submitted for review. It sounds like you created the app just at the time they changed this. I’ve not had a chance to look at the new system, but if you’ve signed up for a developer account, you should be able to see more information and submit it
Thanks Ian! This is helpful as I am trying to create a developer account. It looks like they have changed the process (perhaps in Beta at the moment?). Is there a way to text chat with someone at Twitter? My problem is kind of weird, and can’t move forward due to this snag. It says I need to associate a phone number with the account. To verify it, I’m supposed to receive a code by text message, but it never comes through. Have you seen something like this?
Hi, yes, unfortunately, Twitter have changed things and now you need to sign up for a developer account and they need to then accept you. I’m going to have to update this article. As for your problem, I’ve never had this for Twitter, but I have had it elsewhere. Can you try a different number or can you try again? Unfortunately contacting Twitter is nearly impossible to do. Sorry I can’t be any more helpful!
Thank you! Please know that you are helping so many of us (naive users) to move up to the next level, and we appreciate your dedication to enlightening us.
Hi, Ian! Did you see this: [Twitter] New developer requirements to protect our platform (https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2018/new-developer-requirements-to-protect-our-platform.html)? Will you write new tutorial for creating twitter apps?
Thanks for letting me know about this. I hadn’t seen the news. I understand why Twitter is doing this, but I am quite sad about the news. Twitter has been closing their API more and more over the years and making it more and more difficult for developers. This is the final nail in the coffin. Having said that, it still will be possible to create apps – it’s just that we’ll have to jump through more hoops. I’ll look at updating this tutorial once I’ve tested the new system. Ian
Sir, i am not able to create application in twitter .would u plz help mee.
Hi. Sorry, I can’t help with individual situations. But if you can be more specific with what your issues is, I’ll do my best to help.
Thank you very much for this easy steps and I have created them successfully. I’ve implemented the consumer key/secret key, OAuth access token/secret into my java project. the project was running and getting authentication from twitter but it was not returning to my local app., I think I have mistaken in callback URL. Can you pls tell me how to give call back URL to my localhost.
Hi vinod. I’m not sure I can help you here. In my experience, the callback URL hasn’t been important, so I’ve just added my website. Could you try that? I don’t think you can just add localhost to the URL. Ian
as soon as i fill the create an application form, i get the message “Your application has been created. Please take a moment to review and adjust your application’s settings.” below that, it says “you dont currently have any twitter apps” , instead of the detailed information and the tabs etc. Frustrating
i finally created my access token after filling the form around 20 times. phew. i think they really wanted me to type a website name starting with https:. i was typing http://www.placeholder.com earlier.
Thanks, Rishika. That’s interesting. So they want a secure website. That makes sense, but you would have thought they’d make that clear and give you a helpful error message! Thanks for letting us know!
Hey Gray,
I was searching on the google, youtube, yahoo, bing and many other search engine and coding resources for where to find the consumer key. Finally, i have got it from your blog. Thank you for the detailed steps.
Thanks, Ryan! So glad I was able to help you. That’s exactly why I wrote this article! It’s so hard to find out how to do these things. Ian
Hey, Thanks! Thanks for the first explanation of Twitter app which doesn’t think I know everything there is to know in universal fashion! No matter how many of these I’ve read no one ever took the time to explain what the Token did. I only wish one of these had told me that I shouldn’t have my Twitter token tattooed on my forehead.
My pleasure. I got so frustrated by this myself, and that’s why I researched it (until my head nearly exploded) and wrote this article. So
[…] not go into the detailed steps. You can use this tutorial to set […]
very useful post…thanks
Hi, great article.
I developed an simple app for auto follow my follower. I wrote it in python and test it running the .py script from my computer. It seems running well. My problem is that I don’t know how to “installl” it on twitter so that it can run automatically. Could someone help me? Thanks in advance.
Hi Pasquale, sounds like a fun app. Just be careful, though, auto-following isn’t technically allowed by Twitter. If in doubt, read the terms and conditions for Twitter apps. You don’t install an app on Twitter – you’d have to run this on your own server. Each time it would just connect to the Twitter API and do its thing. Hope that makes sense.
i dont have website what can i do
You don’t need a website – you could just enter your Twitter account url or some other url that describes you. For example an about.me url?
As an enthusiast designer, I think it’s most useful and popular article about Twitter apps. There are a huge number of developers who offered to connect Twitter apps using tools. I hope this sophisticated post helps them to figure out how easy it’s work.
Great, thanks for that. My aim is to make this as easy to understand as possible!
Thanks 🙂
Wow its great information . i extremely enjoyed your article. This article is very helpful for me . Apptunix is software development company so its really helpful for me to build an app .
Thanks with sharing us.
Nice blog, but I would expect some help on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/41548158/apache-oltu-twitter-integration-example-not-working.
Sorry, that isn’t something I can help with personally, but perhaps someone else here can? I think you can promote questions on Stack Overflow that haven’t received enough attention. Perhaps try that?
Quick n Easy tutorial.. thx!
My pleasure. Glad I could help.
I have a development site which is showing 3 most recent Tweets in the footer, and that works fine. I’ve just put a copy of the site live at the main URL, and that is showing that there are 3 Tweets, and when they were made, but the text from the posts isn’t showing on the new live site, but they do on dev.. Most peculiar. Would having a different URL in the app creation page cause this issue?
The only other difference between the sites (apart from having different URLs) is that the live site is HTTPS where the dev site is HTTP. Are you aware of any problems with using secure connections and Twitter’s api?
Hi Ant. I am not sure how you created your app, but I don’t think the URL in the Twitter app settings will make a difference. As far as I know it is just for Twitter’s own information. Ian
Hi,
Please help in sharing website post to twitter wall with post image and title using twitter API. Thanks
I’ve written another article which shows how to get Twitter data, but I haven’t had the time to write one on posting. Hopefully I will one day!
I am a graphic designer. Also i have a IT firm. I read this post. This is very useful for me.Thanks fot this post.
Glad you found it helpful, that was my plan! 🙂
Hi Ian, i tried above steps to create new application but 1. I dont see captcha 2. After filling up all other fields and click on create twitter application, i am redirected to access denied page. Not sure what is missing, please help.
This has been resolved, looks like there was an issue when i created the app.
Glad it has been resolved. I had some issues myself.
Amazing, this is a great article! I did enjoyed reading it, keep your post
It’s very nice and helpful post here for create twitter app . Thanks for step by step details.
I don’t get the part with Website URL
What I have to enter there exactly?
Yes, it is a bit confusing. The website URL isn’t needed really, but Twitter still ask for it. I’d just put in your website’s URL. For example for me, I’d enter http://iag.me/ Hope that helps.
Ian
Hi..
can u please tell that how i can build this app in ruby on rails instead php ??
Sorry, Aziz. I have no knowledge of programming in Ruby on Rails. Best to check out the Twitter API docs and Google a tutorial. There must be a few out there.
Ian
HI…
I am getting below error could you help me .
“Whoa there!
The request token for this page is invalid. It may have already been used, or expired because it is too old. Please go back to the site or application that sent you here and try again; it was probably just a mistake.”
Can’t I run a twitter app on my localhost? Currently i don’t have any web space and domain.
I think it might be possible, but to be honest I’ve not tried it. I know a few other commenters have managed to get this working locally, so I’d try and see how you get on.
Ian
Is It compulsory to enter a website name while filling the form?
i do not have any website what should i do?
please reply
It is compulsory, but you can put any website such as a social profile on there, or put localhost if you’re running it locally.
Ian
when you say using a social profile as the website, can I use G+ or a twitter account?
I am trying to create a Twitter application and have followed your useful steps. But it keeps telling me that it has failed validation as it is not a valid URL format even though I am using the URL of the website I am trying to set up.
Any thoughts?
Hi Isabel, That’s strange. Is there anything unusual about the website address? Is the website accessible?
Ian
Hi Ian – no, I am trying to create a new webiste, using a WordPress theme. My domain name provider is hosting the site for me.
Oh ok. I am not sure, but I think Twitter will check your website address to make sure it is accessible and valid. If not, you may have issues. Can you check with your host to see if it is working?
Ian
That’s a good idea – thanks I will investigate!
Help me how to make twitter application please. Send me full method i want to make an application for twitter to send tweet from my website to my twitter account,,,, Please help me….
many thanks in advance
Hi Hassan, I would suggest looking at my other article, Build your First Twitter App using PHP in 8 Easy Steps. Or, you could hire a developer to do this. Do a search to find someone, or use a service like ODesk or even Fiverr.
Thanks.
I have activated my twitter I am happy like AAAA!
Fab, glad I could help! Ian
hello ian , you look like a very learned gentleman with all this python stuff.
i am currently doing a little project with a friend of mine and we are trying to use twitter to retrieve tweets with a given hash tag and display them on a computer screen.
if you can guide us in any way that would be a great help.
i have already joined twitter but am having difficulty deciding which authentication to choose in https://dev.twitter.com/oauth/overview.
Thanks
Hi, that sounds like an exciting project. In terms of registering your app with Twitter, have a look at my other article on registering your app – http://iag.me/socialmedia/how-to-create-a-twitter-app-in-8-easy-steps/ Hopefully that should help you. Then you’ll need to use the Twitter search request –
https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json. You should be able to tweak the above code to get this to work. Let me know if you need any more help. Ian[…] to do in order to access Twitter’s API is create a Twitter App. You can do that here. A check iag.me’s tutorial blog post on setting up your Twitter […]
Got it working. Thanks.
That’s great news. Could you share with us how you fixed it? It might be useful to other people who come by here?
Ian
Thanks for the tutorial. Unfortunately I can’t get it to run.
I copied and pasted your exact code and I get this message below.
PHP Notice: Use of undefined constant errors - assumed 'errors' in C:Inetpubwwwrootthingzinetwitter1index.php on line 19The line in the code is this one:
if($string["errors"][0]["message"] != "") {echo "Sorry, there was a problem.Twitter returned the following error message:".$string[errors][0]["message"]."";exit();}Any ideas?
Elias
Thanks for this,but i encountered a problem,i am in china,when i create a new application, i need to add my phone to get the consumer key/secret, but i cannt receive the message,what should i do?
That is weird. Does it give you an alternative to authenticate yourself? I know Twitter has the ability to use 2 step authentication using their mobile app. Personally I hate SMS being used this way, because it is insecure and it is relying on network coverage. Ian
Thanks for this
[…] First you will need a Twitter Account. You can create one by visiting http://www.twitter.com. Then you will have to create a Twitter Application. In order to create a Twitter App follow the directions from thiswebsite: http://iag.me/socialmedia/how-to-create-a-twitter-app-in-8-easy-steps/ […]
[…] their developer portal at apps.twitter.com (if this step is unclear to you, please refer to e.g. this guide). Third and last, you can download the complete source code from: […]
I was searching for where to find the consumer key and now got it. Thank you for the detailed steps.
Saving this link for reference. Thanks for writing this up !
Although now, “Create New App” is accessible from “Manage My Apps” link on https://dev.twitter.com/docs
Thanks for this, looks like Twitter have changed things again. I’ve updated the article!
[…] users to grab its data like it used to. You just need to sign in with a Twitter account, click a button to create an App. (You can call it anything; it doesn’t matter.) Then, you are provided keys, a series letters […]
Great one. summed up in this: I was blinded and now I can see!
So glad to hear!
[…] here. If you have any question about creating Twitter application, please follow this good article How to register a Twitter APP in 8 easy steps to create the app step by step. twitter is a very popular Python package, you can use easy_install […]
Ian, Once this app has been associated with a specific twitter account is there anyway to allow it to be associated
with another twitter account?
Also is there anyway to change the domain name in the app once it has been created?
Hi Mike. The app you create using these access tokens will authenticate itself from this one Twitter account. You can still access a wealth of information such as the tweets of other accounts (assuming they’re not protected), Twitter search, Twitter lists and so on. Obviously you can only access the data such as direct messages belonging to the authenticated user. If you want to access another Twitter account, you’ll need to register an app with that account. That’s definitely a good thing- you wouldn’t want to be able to post to any other Twitter account that you don’t own! Does that make sense?
Hi. Great info — most straightforward I have found. Two questions:
1. is there much lag between updating info in the app area and it reflecting the changes? (Like if I change from Read only, to something else)?
2. can I run a grab (using this info with your other blog on grabbing tweets in PHP) successfully locally, or does it have to be on a live site?
I ask because I am getting served a blank screen even though I have quadruple-checked that my oAuth variables are correct.
Thanks!
Hi Robert. Thanks!
I’m not 100% sure, but I think there is a little bit of a lag between changing from read only to read and write. I don’t think you should be waiting for more than 5 minutes. Double check you have the correct tokens when you change.
If you are getting a blank screen, something is going wrong. If you know how to turn on error reporting then do. I’ve made a minor addition to my other article and added a line that outputs an error from Twitter if there is one. Hopefully this will help you to troubleshoot what the issue is.
Please do let me know how you get on.
Ian
Awesome!!! Thank you soooo much!
No problem, Michele. Glad it was helpful. Have you got any ideas as to what you’re going to create?!
[…] using it will be you and the app’s details will be stored in the script. Follow the steps in my How to Create a Twitter App in 8 Easy Steps and you’ll end up with these […]
[…] To authenticate it to your Twitter account, you need to register a Twitter app and get your access tokens as I say in the “How do I install Twools section?” above. It’s really easy to do, and I’ve written an article going through the steps– http://iag.me/socialmedia/how-to-create-a-twitter-app-in-8-easy-steps/ […]
[…] In my last article I explained the steps involved in setting up a developers account at Twitter and registering your first app– making this as easy as possible. Well, it’s time to get your hands dirty and actually build that app! […]