# Getting started

## Introduction

If you are new to Tweepy, this is the place to begin. The goal of this tutorial is to get you set-up and rolling with Tweepy. We won’t go into too much detail here, just some important basics.

## Hello Tweepy

    import tweepy

    auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
    auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)

    api = tweepy.API(auth)

    public_tweets = api.home_timeline()
    for tweet in public_tweets:
        print(tweet.text)

This example will download your home timeline tweets and print each one of their texts to the console. Twitter requires all requests to use OAuth for authentication. The Authentication documentation goes into more details about authentication.

## API

The API class provides access to the entire twitter RESTful API methods. Each method can accept various parameters and return responses. For more information about these methods please refer to API Reference.

## Models

When we invoke an API method most of the time returned back to us will be a Tweepy model class instance. This will contain the data returned from Twitter which we can then use inside our application. For example the following code returns to us a User model:

    # Get the User object for twitter...
    user = api.get_user(screen_name='twitter')

Models contain the data and some helper methods which we can then use:

    print(user.screen_name)
    print(user.followers_count)
    for friend in user.friends():
       print(friend.screen_name)

For more information about models please see ModelsReference.