We're working on documentation to get you started a bit easier. In short, the code at https://github.com/mitdbg/twitinfo/tree/master/server is a django app. You can read about django apps at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/ Two scripts help you actually get the data: https://github.com/mitdbg/twitinfo/blob/master/server/index_tweets.py [indexes tweets as they come in] https://github.com/mitdbg/twitinfo/blob/master/server/stream_tweets.py [brings in tweets with the keywords you want to track] As a sanity check for your setup working, after running "python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000" you should be able to access http://server_ip_address:8000/create_event to create an event to track.