Manage Retweets

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Getting started with the manage Retweets endpoints

This quick start guide will help you make your first request to the manage Retweets endpoints using Postman.

If you would like to see sample code in different languages, please visit our X API v2 sample code GitHub repository. 

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Prerequisites

To complete this guide, you will need to have a set of keys and tokens to authenticate your request. You can generate these keys and tokens by following these steps:

• Sign up for a developer account and receive approval.
• Create a Project and an associated developer App in the developer portal.
• Navigate to your App’s “Keys and tokens” page to generate the required credentials. Make sure to save all credentials in a secure location.

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Steps to build a manage Retweets request

Step one: Start with a tool or library

There are several different tools, code examples, and libraries that you can use to make a request to this endpoint, but we are going to use the Postman tool here to simplify the process.

To load the X API v2 Postman collection into your environment, please click on the following button:

Once you have the X API v2 collection loaded in Postman, navigate to the “Retweets” folder, and select “Retweet a Post”.  

Step two: Authenticate your request

To properly make a request to the X API, you need to verify that you have permission. To do so with this endpoint, you must authenticate your request using either OAuth 1.0a User Context or OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code with PKCE.

In this example, we are going to use OAuth 1.0a User Context.

You must add your keys and tokens – specifically your API Key, API Secret Key, OAuth 1.0a user Access Token, and OAuth 1.0a user Access Token Secret – to Postman. You can do this by selecting the environment named “X API v2” in the top-right corner of Postman and adding your keys and tokens to the “initial value” and “current value” fields (by clicking the eye icon next to the environment dropdown).

These variables will automatically be pulled into the request’s authorization tab if you’ve done this correctly.

Step three: Specify which Post you are going to Retweet

Manage Retweets endpoints require two IDs: one for the user who wishes to Retweet or undo a Retweet and the id of the Post.

The user’s ID must correspond to the authenticating user’s ID, meaning that you must pass the Access Tokens associated with the user ID when authenticating your request.  In this case, you can specify the ID belonging to your own user. You can find your ID in two ways:

1. Using the user lookup by username endpoint, you can pass a username and receive the id field. 
2. Looking at your Access Token, you will find that the numeric part is your user ID.  

You also must specify a Post that you want to Retweet. You can find the Post ID by navigating to X.com and clicking on a Post and then looking in the URL. For example, the following URL’s Post ID is 1228393702244134912.

https://x.com/TwitterDev/status/1228393702244134912

In Postman, navigate to the “Params” tab, and enter your ID into the “Value” column of the id path variable. and enter the ID of the Post you wish to Retweet as the value for thetweet_id parameter. Be sure not to include any spaces before or after any ID.

If you click the “Send” button, you will receive a response object containing the status of the relationship:

• If you receive a “retweeted”: true, then the id is successfully Retweeting the tweet_id.  

Step four: Make your request and review your response

Once you have everything set up, hit the “Send” button and you will receive the following response:

{
    "data": {
        "retweeted": true
    }
}

If you receive a "retweeted": true has successfully Retweeted the tweet_id

If you wish to undo a Retweet by the same user you can use the request entitled “Undo a Retweet”, which is also found in the “Retweets” folder of the X API v2 collection loaded in Postman. The id should be your user ID and source_tweet_id should be the Post ID to undo the Retweet of. You will not have to add this as a JSON body so you will want to make sure that you add in the requisite query params for id and source_tweet_id. 

On a successful undoing of a Retweet, you will receive a similar response to the following example:

{
  "data": {
    "retweeted": false
  }
}