This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide for researchers who wish to use the full-archive search endpoint to search the complete history of public Twitter data. It will also demonstrate the different ways to build a dataset, such as by retrieving geo-tagged Tweets, and how to page through the available Tweets for a query.
 

Prerequisites

Currently, this endpoint is only available as part of the Academic Research product track. In order to use this endpoint, you must apply for access. Learn more about the application and requirements for this track.
 

Connect an app to the academic project

Once you are approved to use the Academic Research product track, you will see your Academic Project in the developer portal. From the "Projects and Apps" section, click on "Add App" to connect your Twitter App to the Project.

Then, you can either choose an existing App and connect it to your project (as shown below).

Or you can create a new App, give it a name and click complete, to connect a new App to your Academic Project.

This will give you your API keys and Bearer Token that you can then use to connect to the full-archive search endpoint.

Connecting to the full-archive search endpoint

The cURL command below shows how you can get historical Tweets from @TwitterDev handle. Replace the $BEARER_TOKEN with your own Bearer Token, paste the full request in your terminal, and press "return".

You will see the response JSON.

By default, only the 10 most recent Tweets will be returned. If you want more than 10 Tweets per request, you can use the max_results parameter and set it to a maximum of 500 Tweets per request, as shown below:

Building queries

As you can see in the example calls above, using the query parameter, you can specify the data that you want to search for. As an example, if you wanted to get all Tweets that contain the word covid or the word coronavirus, you can use the OR operator within brackets, and your query can be (covid OR coronavirus) and thus your API call will look like the following:

Similarly, if you want all Tweets that contain the words covid19 that are not retweets, you can use the is:retweet operator with the logical NOT (represented by -), so your query can be covid19 -is:retweet and your API call will be:

Check out this guide for a complete list of operators that are supported in the full-archive search endpoint.

Using the start_time and end_time parameters to get historical Tweets

When using the full-archive search endpoint, by default Tweets from the last 30 days will be returned. If you want to get Tweets that are older than 30 days, you can use the start_time and end_time parameters in your API call. These parameters must be in a valid RFC3339 date-time format, for example 2020-12-21T13:00:00.00Z. Thus, if you want to get all Tweets from the Twitterdev account for the month of December 2020, your API call will be:

Getting geo-tagged historical Tweets

Geo-tagged Tweets are Tweets that have geographic information associated with them such as city, state, country etc.

Using has:geo operator

If you want to get Tweets that have geo data, you can use the has:geo operator. For example, the following cURL request will get only those Tweets from the @TwitterDev handle that have geo data:

Using place_country operator

Similarly, you can limit Tweets that have geo data, to a specific country, using the place_country operator. The cURL command below will get all Tweets from the @TwitterDev handle from the United States:

The country is specified above using the ISO alpha-2 character code. Valid ISO codes can be found here.
 

Getting more than 500 historical Tweets using the next_token

As mentioned above, by default you can only get up to 500 Tweets per request for a query to the full-archive search endpoint. If there are more than 500 Tweets available for your query, your json response will include a next_token which you can append to your API call in order to get the next available Tweets for this query. This next_token is available in the meta object of your JSON response, which looks something:

Hence, to get the next available Tweets, use the next_token value from this meta object and use the value as the value for the next_token in your API call to the full-archive search endpoint as shown below (You will use your own Bearer Token and the value that you get for the Next Token for your previous API call).