bird

name	bird
description	Read and post to Twitter/X via the `bird` CLI — tweets, threads, search, timelines, bookmarks, follows, lists, media.

Auth: Extract Firefox Cookies

bird needs auth_token and ct0 from Firefox. node:sqlite is broken on this system, so extract manually before every bird session:

cp /home/mikekey/.mozilla/firefox/u80t1430.default-release/cookies.sqlite /tmp/ff_cookies.sqlite
sqlite3 /tmp/ff_cookies.sqlite "SELECT name, value FROM moz_cookies WHERE (host LIKE '%twitter.com%' OR host LIKE '%x.com%') AND name IN ('auth_token', 'ct0');"

Capture both values, then pass to every bird command:

bird <command> --auth-token <auth_token> --ct0 <ct0> --plain ...

Always use --plain (no emoji, no color — stable for LLM parsing). Use --json when structured data is needed. bird check verifies credentials without making other calls.

Commands

Read / discover

bird read <id-or-url>              # single tweet (shortcut: bird <id-or-url>)
bird thread <id-or-url>            # full conversation thread
bird replies <id-or-url>           # replies (--all, --max-pages N)
bird search "query"                # tweet search
bird mentions                      # tweets mentioning current user (or --user <handle>)
bird home                          # "For You" timeline
bird user-tweets <handle>          # profile timeline
bird list-timeline <id-or-url>     # tweets from a list
bird lists                         # your lists
bird news                          # AI-curated news from Explore (alias: trending)
bird bookmarks                     # your bookmarks
bird likes                         # your liked tweets

Write / act

bird tweet "text"                  # post a tweet
bird reply <id-or-url> "text"      # reply to a tweet
bird unbookmark <id-or-url>...     # remove bookmarks (variadic)
bird follow <username-or-id>       # follow
bird unfollow <username-or-id>     # unfollow

Social graph

bird following [handle]            # users followed by current user (or handle)
bird followers [handle]            # followers of current user (or handle)
bird about <username>              # account origin + location info
bird whoami                        # verify which account the cookies belong to

Media attachments (global flags on tweet/reply)

--media <path>                     # repeatable, up to 4 images or 1 video
--alt "text"                       # alt text, repeated per media in order

Example:

bird tweet "caption" --media ./a.png --alt "a description" --media ./b.png --alt "b description"

Auth / infrastructure

bird check                         # verify credentials
bird query-ids                     # show/refresh cached GraphQL query IDs (--json)

Output flags

• --plain — stable, no emoji, no color. Default for LLM use.
• --json — structured output. Works on: read, replies, thread, search, mentions, bookmarks, likes, following, followers, about, lists, list-timeline, user-tweets, query-ids
• --json-full — adds raw API response in _raw field (tweet/reply only)
• --no-emoji, --no-color — individual overrides
• --quote-depth <N> — max quoted-tweet depth (default 1, 0 disables)
• --timeout <ms> — request timeout

Workflow

1. Extract cookies (see Auth section)
2. Store auth_token and ct0 in shell variables
3. Run bird commands with --plain --auth-token "$AUTH_TOKEN" --ct0 "$CT0"
4. On auth errors, re-extract from Firefox — cookies expire

Config files

bird reads ~/.config/bird/config.json5 and ./.birdrc.json5 (JSON5 format). Supports: chromeProfile, chromeProfileDir, firefoxProfile, cookieSource, cookieTimeoutMs, timeoutMs, quoteDepth.

Env vars: NO_COLOR, BIRD_TIMEOUT_MS, BIRD_COOKIE_TIMEOUT_MS, BIRD_QUOTE_DEPTH.

Notes

• Binary: /home/mikekey/.bun/bin/bird (v0.8.0)
• Uses Twitter/X GraphQL API under the hood
• No DM support as of v0.8.0
• Firefox must have an active Twitter/X session for cookies to be valid