Credentials¶

Twitter offers 2 types of credentials and twitter documentation specifies the type of credentials to use for each different endpoint.

Application Credentials that let you perform operations from an application perspective.
User Credentials that let you perform operations from a user perspective.

The documentation will use the following rules regarding the credentials:

appClient indicates that the endpoint requires Application Credentials (with or without bearer token)
userClient indicates that the endpoint requires User Credentials
client indicates that the endpoint requires either application or user credentials.

Application Credentials¶

Twitter applications can perform requests on their own.
Application credentials (also called ConsumerOnlyCredentials) can be used for authenticating users, accessing the webhooks endpoints, running some streams and accessing other endpoints.

Application credentials consist of :

Required CONSUMER_KEY
Required CONSUMER_SECRET
Optional BEARER_TOKEN (learn more here)

// create a consumer only credentials
var appCredentials = new ConsumerOnlyCredentials("CONSUMER_KEY", "CONSUMER_SECRET")
{
    BearerToken = "BEARER_TOKEN" // bearer token is optional in some cases
};

var appClient = new TwitterClient(appCredentials);

Get a Bearer Token¶

Application credentials can be used with or without a Bearer Token depending on the operation.
Usually to run requests on twitter with application credentials you will need to specify the Bearer Token.

You can generate a bearer token as followed.

// get the bearer token and create a client
var consumerOnlyCredentials = new ConsumerOnlyCredentials("CONSUMER_KEY", "CONSUMER_SECRET");
var appClientWithoutBearer = new TwitterClient(consumerOnlyCredentials);

var bearerToken = await appClientWithoutBearer.Auth.CreateBearerTokenAsync();
var appCredentials = new ConsumerOnlyCredentials("CONSUMER_KEY", "CONSUMER_SECRET") 
{
    BearerToken = bearerToken
};

var appClient = new TwitterClient(appCredentials);

// or you simply initialize the bearer token of client
var consumerOnlyCredentials = new ConsumerOnlyCredentials("CONSUMER_KEY", "CONSUMER_SECRET");
var appClient = new TwitterClient(consumerOnlyCredentials);

await appClient.Auth.InitializeClientBearerTokenAsync();

// the appClient requests will now use the bearer token

User Credentials¶

User credentials is a combination of user keys and consumer keys.
They a user to authenticate through a specific Twitter application.

To perform an operation on behalf of a user (e.g. publishing a tweet), an application will need to execute this operation with the user credentials.

User credentials consist of :

Required CONSUMER_KEY
Required CONSUMER_SECRET
Required ACCESS_TOKEN
Required ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET

var userCredentials = new TwitterCredentials("CONSUMER_KEY", "CONSUMER_SECRET", "ACCESS_TOKEN", "ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET");
var userClient = new TwitterClient(appCredentials);

To request user credentials, you need to ask this user to authenticate and authorise your application.
Learn more about authentication