Tweepy: Stream listener not capturing anything

Question

I have this code that used to work fine like three months ago, but now it's not working. Stream listener is not capturing anything. It's just silent, neither capturing tweets nor throwing errors. It's running but I can't observe any activity. I checked the API connection by updating the status. I am running it in a Google Cloud Instance however, I also tried it on my workstation. So that I can rule out that Google Cloud Instance has something to do with this.

# Standard library
import logging
import datetime, time
import sqlite3

# External library
import tweepy

# Logging configuration
logging.basicConfig(filename='../.log/tweets_capture.log',level=logging.INFO)

# Twitter OAuth authentication
# This is where your key and secrete for twitter login should go.
# More info at https://www.slickremix.com/docs/how-to-get-api-keys-and-tokens-for-twitter/
with open('../../cred/bioinfobotmain.txt', 'r') as f: # Reading the credentials from a text file.
    creds = f.readlines()
    consumer_key = creds[0].rstrip()
    consumer_secret = creds[1].rstrip()
    access_token = creds[2].rstrip()
    access_token_secret = creds[3].rstrip()
    auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
    auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)

api = tweepy.API(auth)
#api.update_status('Start Streaming')

# Subclass for stream listener
class StreamListener(tweepy.StreamListener):
    def on_status(self, status):
        print(status.text)
        if status.lang == 'en' and 'RT'.upper() not in status.text :
            stat = status.text
            stat = stat.replace('\n','')
            stat = stat.replace('\t','')
            user_id = status.user.id_str
            stat_id = status.id_str
            create = str(status.created_at)
            name = status.user.screen_name
            data = (create, name, user_id, stat_id, stat)
            #Connecting to SQLite3 database
            try:
                db_file = '../../db/bioinfotweet.db'
                conn = sqlite3.connect(db_file, isolation_level=None)
                conn.execute('PRAGMA journal_mode=wal') # This will let concurrent read and write to the database. 
                c = conn.cursor()
                c.execute("INSERT INTO tweetscapture (Date, ScreenName, UserID, TweetID, Text) values (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)", data)
                conn.commit()
                cdate="Tweet inserted at: "+str(datetime.datetime.now())
                logging.info(cdate)
                conn.close()
            except Exception as ex:
                exname = str(ex)
                template = "An exception of type {0} occurred. Arguments:\n{1!r}"
                message = template.format(type(ex).__name__, ex.args)
                logging.info("Sqlite3 database exception occurred.")
                logging.info(message)

    def on_error(self, status_code):
        if status_code == 420:
            cdate = "Error code 420 at:"+str(datetime.datetime.now())
            logging.info(cdate)
            logging.info("Sleeping for 15 mins")
            time.sleep(900)
        return False

stream_listener = StreamListener()
stream = tweepy.Stream(auth=api.auth, listener=stream_listener)
cdate="Stream started at: "+str(datetime.datetime.now())
logging.info(cdate)

while True:
    try:
        stream.userstream(encoding='utf8')
    except Exception as ex:
        exname = str(ex)
        template = "An exception of type {0} occurred. Arguments:\n{1!r}"
        message = template.format(type(ex).__name__, ex.args)
        logging.info("Generic exception occurred.")
        logging.info(message)
        if "not defined" in exname:
            break
        else:
            logging.info("Sleeping for 60 sec")
            time.sleep(60)
            continue

Answer 1

User streams were retired on August 23rd 2018. Your code calls stream.userstream which will no longer work. See this announcement for more information.