How can I get tweets older than a week (using tweepy or other python libraries)

Question

I have been trying to figure this out but this is a really frustrating. I'm trying to get tweets with a certain hashtag (a great amount of tweets) using Tweepy. But this doesn't go back more than one week. I need to go back at least two years for a period of a couple of months. Is this even possible, if so how?

Just for the check here is my code

import tweepy
import csv

consumer_key = '####'
consumer_secret = '####'
access_token = '####'
access_token_secret = '####'

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

# Open/Create a file to append data
csvFile = open('tweets.csv', 'a')
#Use csv Writer
csvWriter = csv.writer(csvFile)


for tweet in tweepy.Cursor(api.search,q="#ps4",count=100,\
                           lang="en",\
                           since_id=2014-06-12).items():
    print tweet.created_at, tweet.text
    csvWriter.writerow([tweet.created_at, tweet.text.encode('utf-8')])

Answer 1

As you have noticed Twitter API has some limitations, I have implemented a code that do this using the same strategy as Twitter running over a browser. Take a look, you can get the oldest tweets: https://github.com/Jefferson-Henrique/GetOldTweets-python

Answer 2

You cannot use the twitter search API to collect tweets from two years ago. Per the docs:

Also note that the search results at twitter.com may return historical results while the Search API usually only serves tweets from the past week. - Twitter documentation.

If you need a way to get old tweets, you can get them from individual users because collecting tweets from them is limited by number rather than time (so in many cases you can go back months or years). A third-party service that collects tweets like Topsy may be useful in your case as well (shut down as of July 2016, but other services exist).