Question

I’m currently using twitty-twister to stream live Twitter messages into a long-running app, however sometimes I need to restart the stream to change the tracking parameters. Is it possible to disconnect this stream from Twitter using this library?

Answer 1

After doing some research on this problem, I discovered that it isn’t possible to “turn off” the Twitter stream.

The solution was to instead run the Twitty Twister script within its own process using reactor.spawnProcess:

# spawnProcess requires you to implement a ProcessProtocol
class TwitterProcess(protocol.ProcessProtocol):
    def outReceived(self, data):
        print("TWITTER: ", data)

    def errReceived(self, data):
        print("TWITTER ERR: ", data)

    def processEnded(self, reason):
        print("twitter process ended.")

# later on...

args = ["python", "twitter_stream.py"] # add other args here if necessary
pp = TwitterProcess()
feedProcess = reactor.spawnProcess(pp, "python", args)

Then if you want to close the process:

feedProcess.signalProcess("TERM")