Connection refused to Twitter API on PythonAnywhere

Question

I am trying to connect to the twitter streaming API on Python anywhere, but always get a connection refused error.

I use Tweepy in my application, and to test the connection I am using the streaming example that can be found in the repo.

HEre is a sum-up of the code :

from tweepy.streaming import StreamListener
from tweepy import OAuthHandler
from tweepy import Stream

# Go to http://dev.twitter.com and create an app. 
# The consumer key and secret will be generated for you after
consumer_key=""
consumer_secret=""

# After the step above, you will be redirected to your app's page.
# Create an access token under the the "Your access token" section
access_token=""
access_token_secret=""

class StdOutListener(StreamListener):
    """ A listener handles tweets are the received from the stream. 
    This is a basic listener that just prints received tweets to stdout.

    """
    def on_data(self, data):
        print data
        return True

    def on_error(self, status):
        print status

if __name__ == '__main__':
    l = StdOutListener()
    auth = OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
    auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)

    stream = Stream(auth, l)    
    stream.filter(track=['basketball'])

When I run this line in a bash console in python anywhere (after having filled the tokens of course)

12:02 ~/tweepy/examples (master)$ python streaming.py 

I get the following error :

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "streaming.py", line 33, in <module>
    stream.filter(track=['basketball'])
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tweepy/streaming.py", line 228, in filter
    self._start(async)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tweepy/streaming.py", line 172, in _start
    self._run()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tweepy/streaming.py", line 106, in _run
    conn.connect()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 1157, in connect
    self.timeout, self.source_address)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/socket.py", line 571, in create_connection
    raise err
socket.error: [Errno 111] Connection refused

The domain .twitter.com is in the pythonanywhere whithelist though, so i don't understand why the connection would be refused :s.

The very same code works like a charm on my Ubuntu.

Any idea would be more than welcome, thanks !!

Answer 1

If you're using a Free account, tweepy won't work. It does not use the proxy settings from the environment.

There is a fork of tweepy that you might be able to use (http://github.com/ducu/tweepy) until the main line uses the proxy settings correctly.

Answer 2

As Glenn said, there currently isn't proxy support in tweepy.

For a reason I cannot explain (and isn't documented), a pull request was closed without any merge about a month ago.

https://github.com/tweepy/tweepy/pull/152

There apparently is a fork available on github (see Glenn's answer), but I didn't test it.

Knowing that I would need to use my own domain name in the end, I finally got a paid account on pythonanywhere and got rid of the proxy stuff all together.