twitter image fetcher

main.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

""" Sample calls:
http://twimgproxy.appspot.com/image?screen_name=evanlong
http://twimgproxy.appspot.com/image?user_id=20
"""

from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from google.appengine.ext.webapp import util
from google.appengine.api.urlfetch import fetch
import simplejson as json
import logging
import urllib

class ImageHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        BASE_URL = "https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?"

        screen_name = self.request.get("screen_name")
        user_id = self.request.get("user_id")
        fetch_response = None
        if screen_name:
            params = urllib.urlencode({"screen_name": screen_name})
            fetch_response = fetch(BASE_URL + params)
        elif user_id:
            params = urllib.urlencode({"user_id": user_id})
            fetch_response = fetch(BASE_URL + params)
        else:
            self.error(404)
            return

        limit = fetch_response.headers.get("X-RateLimit-Remaining")
        if limit:
            self.response.headers["X-Twitter-RateLimit-Remaining"] = limit

        if fetch_response.status_code != 200:
            self.error(404)
            return

        content = fetch_response.content

        parsed = {}
        try:
            parsed = json.loads(content)
        except ValueError:
            logging.error("Invalid json for request %s" % self.request)

        image_url = parsed.get("profile_image_url_https")
        if image_url:
            self.redirect(image_url)
        else:
            self.error(404)

def main():
    application = webapp.WSGIApplication([('/image', ImageHandler)],
                                         debug=True)
    util.run_wsgi_app(application)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Why not use Twitter? users/profile_image/:screen_name

I don't really get its "screen_name" it works but if the user name is an integer then it lookups up by user_id.

http://api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/14967425.json -> @evanlong image instead of @14967425 image. Not that big a deal but @Divi said he would pay for a service that worked with user_id and screen_name so I did my best effort to think about the quirks. Gotta work hard for my €€€ although it's mostly a troll script.

Although it is slow and still rate limited. And only sort of works around rate limiting because google's url fetchers have many IPs they work from (looking at the rate limit headers coming back I am obviously not the only person using app engine for this)