On his site ** has posted a tutorial showing you how to use the Twitter Streaming API from PHP with some help from the Phirehose package.

Twitter provides a streaming API with which you can do interesting things such as listen for tweets that contain specific strings or actions a user might take (e.g. liking a tweet, following someone,…). In this post you’ll learn an easy way to work with that API.

When researching on how to work with the streaming API in PHP it stumbled upon Phirehose. This package can authenticate and set up a connection with the streaming API.

Since the Phirehose API is a bit difficult to work with, he created a package (Laravel version) to help make it a bit easier. He then walks you through the integration of this service with a Laravel-based application, including showing you how to set up the app on the Twitter side and get the API key/secret for the connection. He shows how to add the Laravel package version's provider to the configuration and create a first stream type: listening for certain hashtags. He shows how the stream reacts to a simple tweet of his with the "#laravel" hashtag in a console application. He also includes another example showing a stream that listens for people performing actions on the current user's stream (like favoriting a tweet). You can find out more about the powerful Stream API in the official Twitter documentation for the service.