Using the tweepy library to stream tweets has a catch. There is no built-in feature that allows you to stop streaming after a fixed time. To avoid manually terminating the stream, this code proposes a simple solution without any (complex) multi-threading.

streamer.py

import os
import time
import tweepy

from tweepy import OAuthHandler
from tweepy import Stream
from tweepy import StreamListener


def authenticate():
    '''Use credentials to authenticate user'''
    consumerkey = os.environ.get('CONSUMER_KEY')
    consumersecret = os.environ.get('CONSUMER_SECRET')
    accesstoken = os.environ.get('ACCESS_TOKEN')
    accesssecret = os.environ.get('ACCESS_SECRET')
    auth = OAuthHandler(consumerkey, consumersecret)
    auth.set_access_token(accesstoken, accesssecret)
    api = tweepy.API(auth)
    return auth, api


if __name__ == "__main__":
    auth, api = authenticate()
    
    '''Live streaming tweets for a specific interval of time'''
    runtime = 60 #Tracking for 60 seconds
    tweetstream = Stream(auth, StreamListener())
    tweetstream.filter(track=['twitter'], is_async=True)
    time.sleep(runtime)
    tweetstream.disconnect()

v3 line 28; should be is_async=True and should line 30 be tweetstream.disconnect() ?

Thank you for catching the typos and API updates @pilou-K75VJ and @stevenmcsorley!

Doesn't seem to work, I put some print statements after stream.filter, time.sleep and stream.disconnect, everything prints but the console hangs. How can I terminate the whole process?

@Kwieeciol Not sure why the process will not terminate if you are able to successfully disconnect (as evidenced by your print statement after .disconnect()). Maybe you have some other thread that is running? Or maybe there was a breaking change in recent API updates?

I am not actively maintaining this anymore. Perhaps, ask on stack overflow or open an issue on tweepy. I am happy to update the gist if you figure out the issue!

@AparaV, it's the only thread. I think the issue might be that the thread where stream.filter is being ran doesn't terminate. Thanks anyways! I'll investigate the issue.