pytok

This is a Playwright based version of David Teacher's unofficial api wrapper for TikTok.com in python. It re-implements a currently limited set of the features of the original library, with a shifted focus on using browser automation to allow automatic captcha solves with a hopefully minor trade-off in performance.

Installation

pip install git+https://github.com/networkdynamics/pytok.git@master

Quick Start Guide

Here's a quick bit of code to get the videos from a particular hashtag on TikTok. There's more examples in the examples directory.

import asyncio

from pytok.tiktok import PyTok

async def main():
    async with PyTok() as api:
        user = api.user(username="therock")
        user_data = await user.info()
        print(user_data)

        videos = []
        async for video in user.videos():
            video_data = video.info()
            print(video_data)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

Please note pulling data from TikTok takes a while! We recommend leaving the scripts running on a server for a while for them to finish downloading everything. Feel free to play around with the delay constants to either speed up the process or avoid TikTok rate limiting, like so: PyTok(request_delay=10)

Please do not hesitate to make an issue in this repo to get our help with this!

Citation

If you use this library in your research, please cite it using the following BibTeX entry:

@software{ben_steel_2024_12802714,
  author       = {Ben Steel and
                  Alexei Abrahams},
  title        = {{networkdynamics/pytok: Initial working version of 
                   library}},
  month        = jul,
  year         = 2024,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {v0.1.0},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.12802714},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12802714}
}

Format and Schema

The JSONable dictionary returned by the info() methods contains all of the data that the TikTok API returns. We have provided helper functions to parse that data into Pandas DataFrames, utils.get_comment_df(), utils.get_video_df() and utils.get_user_df() for the data from comments, videos, and users respectively.