Important Update

Starting February 9, Twitter will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead. I won't be paying for it. So I no longer plan to maintain or test this project. The script should work fine anyway.

Twitter Handle Checker (Username Availability)

According to birdman, Twitter will soon start freeing the name space of inactive accounts. Here's a script to check if your favorite Twitter handle is available, from the command line OR receive an email notification when the username is available.

Prerequisites & dependencies

• Access to the Twitter API
• Python (tested on v3.10.8)
• Tweepy (tested on v4.12.1) (pip install tweepy)
• schedule 1.1.0 (pip install schedule)

How-to

1. Get your Twitter consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token, and access_token_secret
2. Install Tweepy pip install tweepy
3. Edit the twitter-checker.py script and add the variables
4. Run python3 twitter-checker.py username and wait for the results

Recommended

• Make twitter-checker.py executable, chmod +x twitter-checker.py
• Add twitter-checker.py to your dot file (.zshrc, .bashrc, etc.)
• Set an alias like alias twitter="python3 twittercheck.py"
• Now you can check Twitter username availability with the command twitter username

Get email notifications

Use the twitter-checker-mail.py and tweak the variables. You'll receive an email when the username is available. Be mindful about schedule.every(5).minutes.do(check_user), though. Every five minutes, an API call is made.