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Over the past few weeks, two new versions of twurl have been released, bringing the utility up to the latest version, 0.9.5.

This is the first major update to twurl in nearly 4 years, and represents a major improvement to the tool. We recommend that all users upgrade to version 0.9.5 to take advantage of the bug fixes and feature enhancements.

What is twurl?

twurl is our command-line utility for testing the Twitter APIs. You can think of twurl as being a little bit like curl, but with built-in support for Twitter’s authentication methods, making it easy to test out different API endpoints.

What’s new / what’s fixed?

You can check out the full changelog for both versions (0.9.4 and 0.9.5) of twurl on GitHub. Here are the key improvements:

  • Support for Bearer Tokens (application-only authentication, --bearer option and bearer_tokens subcommand). This makes twurl compatible with the premium APIs, as well as with the new APIs currently under development as part of Twitter Developer Labs. See the README for more information.
  • Prettified JSON output (--json-pretty option).
  • Configurable timeout options (--timeout and --connection-timeout).
  • Improvements to parsing and escaping of different characters (previously, the asterisk character * would not be handled correctly).
  • Aliases are working again. See the README for information on how to configure twurl aliases (command shortcuts).
  • twurl now correctly identifies itself and the local Ruby version via the User-Agent header.

Upgrading

twurl is written in Ruby, and distributed through RubyGems.

To upgrade, simply run:

$ gem update twurl

You can confirm the version of twurl in use on your system:

$ twurl -v
0.9.5

Note that twurl now requires a minimum Ruby version of 2.4.0.

Learn more

There are some useful tutorials available to learn more about twurl.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the community for all their support and use of twurl over the years, and for the many contributions that went into this release. In particular, a huge thanks to @jryso for driving these improvements!

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