rtweet - Warning: 32 - Could not authenticate you - r

Question

I notice a few people have encountered issues with rtweet authorization. I followed this vignette which assumes people are familiar with authentication protocols. Newbies such as myself, struggle with this.
vignette("auth", package = "rtweet")`
I stored all keys and tokens in my .Renviron file. This is the code I use to access keys and tokens:
require(rtweet)
require(httpuv)
api_key <- Sys.getenv("TWITTER")
api_secret_key <- Sys.getenv("TWITTER_SECRET")
access_token <- Sys.getenv("ACCESS_TOKEN")
access_token_secret <- Sys.getenv("ACCESS_SECRET")
I then create a token using this code:
token <- create_token(
app = "my_app",
consumer_key = api_key,
consumer_secret = api_secret_key,
access_token = access_token,
access_secret = access_token_secret)
Next, I check if a token has been created:
get_token()
I get this response:
<Token>
<oauth_endpoint>
request: https://api.twitter.com/oauth/request_token
authorize: https://api.twitter.com/oauth/authenticate
access: https://api.twitter.com/oauth/access_token
<oauth_app> my_app
key: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
secret: <hidden>
<credentials> oauth_token, oauth_token_secret
---
I restarted R and run a query as follows:
tweet_data <- search_tweets("#plasticrecycling",
n = 2000,
include_rts = F,
lang = "en")
And end up with this error:
Warning: 32 - Could not authenticate you.
Warning message:
Could not authenticate you.
Can someone please explain why this is happening? A similar issue was reported here https://github.com/ropensci/rtweet/issues/439 but it was closed without a clear answer. I am not sure if create_token() is a once-off thing or must be initiated each time I use R. I notice this added to my .Renviron file:
TWITTER_PAT=/Users/bob/.rtweet_token.rds
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Loading the latest development version of rtweet solves the problem I was encountering:
remotes::install_github("rOpenSci/rtweet")
packageVersion("rtweet")
[1] ‘0.7.0.9026’
This version makes it easier to authenticate things.
auth <- rtweet_app(bearer_token = Sys.getenv("BEARER_TOKEN"))
auth_save(auth, "my_app")
auth_list()
[1] "my_app"
auth_as(auth = "my_app")
tweets <- search_tweets("#plasticrecycling",
include_rts = F,
n = 1000,
lang = "en")
One only has to run the rtweet_app() once and then save the output. Every time one restarts R and loads a Twitter script, one simply has to execute auth_as(auth = "your_app")
I was confused by OAuth1.0 versus OAuth2.0 on the Twitter API page. It also did not help reading the wrong online manual pages for a different version of rtweet!
Kudos to llrs for helping me resolve my issue.