socialshares 1.1.0

A command-line and programmatic interface to various social sharecount endpoints.

A command-line utility and Python library to access the social share counts for a particular URL.

Note: unfortunately this utility can no longer be used to fetch tweet and retweet counts, as Twitter has removed the API this functionality relied on. Facebook and other platforms still work.

Usage

Usage:
  socialshares <url> [<platforms>...] [options]

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this screen.
  -p, --plain  Plain output.
  -r <attempts>, --retry <attempts>  Retry fetching up to <attempt> times [default: 1]
  -e, --exit  Exit with an error code when not all counts could be fetched.

Some examples:

# fetch count for all supported platforms,
# try again once (the default) for platforms that fail
$ socialshares http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

# fetch only facebook
$ socialshares http://www.theguardian.com/politics facebook     --retry 2

Supported platforms

Platform	Description
facebook	facebook shares and comments
linkedin	linkedin shares
google	google +1’s
pinterest	pinterest pins
reddit	reddit ups and downs (summed across posts)

Platforms are fetched in parallel and retried (once by default.) If no platforms are specified, just facebook and twitter will be returned.

Unsupported platforms

The following APIs unfortunately no longer exist, and have been removed from the interface.

Platform	Description
twitter	twitter tweets and retweets containing the URL
facebookfql	facebook likes, shares and comments

Output

By default, socialshares outputs JSON:

{
  "reddit": {
    "downs": 0,
    "ups": 6
  },
  "google": 20,
  "facebook": 1498,
  "twitter": 300,
  "pinterest": 1
}

Use the --plain flag if instead you’d like space-separated output.

$ socialshares http://www.theguardian.com/politics twitter
57

Usage from Python

import socialshares
counts = socialshares.fetch(url, ['facebook', 'pinterest'])

Installation

pip install socialshares
# optionally, for asynchronous fetching
pip install grequests

If requests_futures and (for Python 2.x) futures are installed, social-shares will use these packages to speed up share count fetching, by accessing the various social media APIs in parallel.