Send your first X (Twitter) API request

Send synchronous requests to all 2 Bright Data X (Twitter) Scraper API endpoints with copy-paste examples for profiles and posts collection.

This tutorial walks you through sending a synchronous request to each Bright Data X Scraper API endpoint. By the end, you’ll have working examples for profiles and posts.

Prerequisites

• A Bright Data account with an active API key
• Completed the Quickstart

Request structure

Every synchronous request follows the same pattern:

POST https://api.brightdata.com/datasets/v3/scrape?dataset_id={DATASET_ID}&format=json
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY
Content-Type: application/json

[{"url": "https://x.com/..."}]

The only thing that changes between endpoints is the dataset_id and the input URL format.

Synchronous requests support up to 20 URLs and have a 1-minute timeout. If the request takes longer, the API automatically returns a snapshot_id instead. See async requests.

How to scrape X (Twitter) profiles

Dataset ID: gd_lwxmeb2u1cniijd7t4

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.brightdata.com/datasets/v3/scrape?dataset_id=gd_lwxmeb2u1cniijd7t4&format=json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '[{"url": "https://x.com/elonmusk"}]'

You should see a 200 response. This takes 10-30 seconds.

Example response

[
  {
    "user_name": "elonmusk",
    "name": "Elon Musk",
    "description": "Read @WallStreetSilv",
    "followers": 214000000,
    "following": 870,
    "number_of_tweets": 52000,
    "is_verified": true,
    "profile_image_link": "https://..."
  }
]

Full Profiles response schema

How to scrape X (Twitter) posts

Dataset ID: gd_lwxkxvnf1cynvib9co

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.brightdata.com/datasets/v3/scrape?dataset_id=gd_lwxkxvnf1cynvib9co&format=json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '[{"url": "https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1234567890123456789"}]'

Example response

[
  {
    "url": "https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1234567890123456789",
    "user_posted": "elonmusk",
    "description": "Exciting times ahead...",
    "date_posted": "2024-04-03T14:30:00.000Z",
    "likes": 125000,
    "retweets": 18000,
    "replies": 5200,
    "hashtags": ["technology", "innovation"]
  }
]

Full Posts response schema

Quick reference: dataset IDs

Endpoint	Dataset ID	URL pattern
Profiles	gd_lwxmeb2u1cniijd7t4	x.com/{username}
Posts	gd_lwxkxvnf1cynvib9co	x.com/{username}/status/{id}

Output formats

Control the response format with the format query parameter:

Value	Description
json	JSON array (default)
ndjson	Newline-delimited JSON, one record per line
csv	Comma-separated values

Next steps

Async batch requests

Scrape hundreds of URLs in a single batch job.

API reference

Full parameter and response field reference.