OAuth through HTTP with Twitter

0
votes

I've been using Tweepy for OAuth and twitter API calls. For a whole bunch of reasons, I'm switching to urllib and making HTTP requests directly.

It appears have two options:

  • I can do oAuth directly over HTTP, but the existing resources seem to either say "don't bother, just use a library," or they don't cover half of the process.
  • I can continue using Tweepy to get a key/secret pair, but from there I'm still not clear on how to use that pair to authenticate my queries. Specifically, what do I have to do before "https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/home_timeline.json" to authenticate, supposing I've already completed the OAuth process and have a key/secret for the user I want.
1
httptwitteroauth

1 Answers

2
votes

Why don't you use a more generic oauth library (like oauth2), instead of throwing out the oauth authentication library idea entirely?

https://github.com/simplegeo/python-oauth2

Signing a request for OAuth means either implementing the signature function yourself for each request or using an existing library - and creating oauth signatures is pretty complicated and prone to breakage. As someone who's supported OAuth-based APIs for a couple of years I strongly encourage you to use a library.

The oauth2 library has an example for getting a token/secret for twitter.

Once you've gotten the token and secret, the oauth library is as simple as:

consumer = oauth.Consumer(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
token = oauth.Token(token,secret)
client = oauth.Client(consumer,token)
response = make_request(client,"https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/home_timeline.json")