[OSINT] 3 Nights of Twint Drama Boiled Down to 4 Steps

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Hey all! Quick one here. Twint does not currently work without some modifications. I fought with it for several nights and hope now you won't have to. 





I came across Twint during the TCM Security OSINT course and promptly was like "I'm gonna install that and play with it!" A week later, I've learned some things about installing it and have yet to play with it. This post serves to document what I had to do to get it to work. It may or many not work for you but it's worth a shot if you meet the following specifications: 

  • Kali Linux 2022.3 (with updates)
  • The following software selection


1 pipenv

I decided to install Twint via pipenv (s/o to Gray on the TCM Discord for suggestion/direction and some of the work here is theirs). It did not install via pip so I decided to install it via sudo, although if I was not on an easily burnable virtual machine I would have looked for another method (like homebrew or something). 

Code: sudo -H pip install -U pipenv



2 Install Twint


Install Twint with: pipenv install git+https://github.com/twintproject/twint.git#egg=twint

Record the "virtualenv location" in the output - you need this in step 3 home/kaliosint/.local/share/virtualenvs/[kali user name here]


3 Update cli.py


The cli.py file needs to be updated to the following: 

In /home/kaliosint/.local/share/virtualenvs/[from step 2] and make the following modification to line 335: 
Comment out (#) - if float(version) < 3.6: 
Add (keep same indent) - if sys.version_info < (3,6):





*You may need to install once more to ensure that the changes take effect*
*Skip to step 5 and see if it works from here*


(Possible Issue) 4 Update requirements.txt & reinstall requirements.txt

The requirements.txt files needs to be updated at /home/[kali user name here]/src/twint/requirements.txt from aiohttp to aiohttp==3.7.0


Then, perform pip3 install . -r requirements.txt

If you are getting this error, you might need to do the step above.




5 Run Twint


Run via pipenv run twint and hopefully you see that sweet, sweet data!





Now, the fun part should be actually playing with the tool.