OAuth

18 Jan 2010 – San Antonio

I have gotten tired of twitterfeed not handling our RSS feed and tweeting our new posts. So have the other LosTechies members. I decided to finally learn OAuth so that I can write a script/app to handle tweeting our new blog posts.

This is the way I learned so bare with me.

First things first, is you have to go to twitter and login to your account. Once done, register your OAuth application and click the Register a new application link. This will set you up with an OAuth consumer key and secret; which we need to obtain the OAuth request token/secret and our ultimate goal of an OAuth access token/secret.

Required fields that I had to fill out were:

Application Name
Descriptions
Application Website
Application Type (I chose Client)
Default Access Type (I chose Read & Write)
ReCaptcha at the bottom.

Once accepted you’ll be directed to a page displaying your consumer key and secret, like this:

I’ve looked at a few ways to do this and the easiest that I found was by using the twitter_oauth gem. Following the README for this gem I was able to get an access token/secret pretty easily.

I’m doing all of this through IRB because there is one part where you need to open a web page and allow your twitter client to post to Twitter.

~ > irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> require 'twitter_oauth'
=> true
irb(main):003:0> client = TwitterOAuth::Client.new(
irb(main):004:1* :consumer_key => 'YOUR_APP_CONSUMER_KEY',
irb(main):005:1* :consumer_secret => 'YOURA_APP_CONSUMER_SECRET')
)
=> ...object output...
irb(main):005:0> request_token = client.request_token
=> ...object output...
irb(main):006:0> puts request_token.key, request_token.secret
=> [REQUEST_TOKEN]
=> [REQUEST_SECRET]

irb(main):007:0> request_token.authorize_url
=> http://twitter.com/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=TOKEN

Copy that url and put it into your browser of choice. When the “Deny” and “Allow” buttons become visible, click the “Allow” button. You will be presented with a numeric PIN. Copy that number into your clipboard because we’re going to use it on this final step to obtain the OAuth Access Token and Secret.

irb(main):007:0> access_token = client.authorize(
irb(main):008:1*   request_token.token,
irb(main):009:1*   request_token.secret,
irb(main):0010:1*  :oauth_verifier => 'THE_NUMERIC_PIN_YOU_GOT_FROM_TWITTER'
irb(main):0011:1* )
=> ...object output...
irb(main):0011:0> puts access_token.key, access_token.secret
=> [ACCESS_TOKEN]
=> [ACCESS_SECRET]
irb(main):0012:0> client.authorized?
=> true

You now have everything you need to use the TwitterOAuth gem without having to authenticate everytime.

irb(main):0013:0> client = TwitterOAuth::Client.new(
irb(main):0014:1*    :consumer_key => 'YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY',
irb(main):0015:1*    :consumer_secret => 'YOUR-CONSUMER-SECRET',
irb(main):0016:1*    :token => access_token.token, 
irb(main):0017:1*    :secret => access_token.secret
)
=> ...object output...
irb(main):0017:0> client.authorized?
=> true

That is how I figured out OAuth without a callback URL. Hacky, but it works.

OAuth

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