Get All Follower IDs in Twitter by Tweepy

In order to avoid rate limit, you can/should wait before the next follower page request. Looks hacky, but works:

import time
import tweepy

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(..., ...)
auth.set_access_token(..., ...)

api = tweepy.API(auth)

ids = []
for page in tweepy.Cursor(api.followers_ids, screen_name="McDonalds").pages():
    ids.extend(page)
    time.sleep(60)

print len(ids)

Hope that helps.

Use the rate limiting arguments when making the connection. The api will self control within the rate limit.

The sleep pause is not bad, I use that to simulate a human and to spread out activity over a time frame with the api rate limiting as a final control.

api = tweepy.API(auth, wait_on_rate_limit=True, wait_on_rate_limit_notify=True, compression=True)

also add try/except to capture and control errors.

example code https://github.com/aspiringguru/twitterDataAnalyse/blob/master/sample_rate_limit_w_cursor.py

I put my keys in an external file to make management easier.

https://github.com/aspiringguru/twitterDataAnalyse/blob/master/keys.py