Searching and profiles

Three commands cover finding things by words and reading an account. search returns mixed hits, users narrows to accounts, and user reads one profile in full. search and users ride the signed API plane and may exit 4 from a datacenter IP. user reads the profile page's own JSON, which answers from many IPs but is sometimes gated too. See troubleshooting.

Search for videos and accounts

search returns a mixed stream of video and account hits. Each hit carries a type (video or user), an id, a title, an author, and a url:

tt search "study with me" -n 20
tt search study with me -n 20      # quotes are optional, words join

The type field lets you split the stream after the fact:

tt search "lofi" -n 50 -o jsonl | jq -r 'select(.type == "user") | .url'

Narrow to accounts

When you only want accounts, users skips the videos and returns full profile records, the same shape user returns:

tt users "news" -n 20
tt users news -o csv --fields unique_id,nickname,follower_count,verified

Read one profile

user takes a handle, with or without the @, or a full profile url. It returns one record with the nickname, the bio, the region, the verified and private flags, and the follower, following, heart, and video counts:

tt user tiktok
tt user @tiktok -o json
tt user https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok -o json

The record's sec_uid is the opaque id the posts feed takes directly, so you can go from a profile straight to its videos without a second lookup:

secuid=$(tt user tiktok -o json | jq -r .sec_uid)
tt posts "$secuid" -n 60 -o jsonl

From a search to the feeds

Because every hit and profile carries a url and an id, a search result flows into the single commands. Find accounts, then page the first one's videos:

first=$(tt users "minecraft" -n 1 -o json | jq -r .unique_id)
tt posts "@$first" -n 30 -o url