soauth

SOAuth

The "S" is for "Signs"

SOAuth is a Ruby library that creates HTTP headers for OAuth Authorization using previously-obtained OAuth keys/secrets. Useful if you want to make your own HTTP request objects instead of using the ones created for you using the commonly-used OAuth gem.

It should be noted that this was developed without edge cases in mind -- it was pretty much abstracted from my "by-hand" signing of OAuth requests in Prey Fetcher, so don't consider it production-quality code (though it is running in production).

Please fork away and send me a pull request if you think you can make it better or handle more use cases.

Installation

Assuming you have Gemcutter setup as a gem source, install like any other Ruby gem:

gem install soauth

If you don't already have Gemcutter setup as one of your gem sources, install SOAuth with the following command:

gem install soauth --source http://gemcutter.org/

Usage

Create an OAuth header by specifying the URI of the resource you're requesting, your consumer key/secret + access key/secret in a hash, and -- optionally -- any GET params in another hash. Check it out:

uri = 'https://twitter.com/direct_messages.json'
oauth = {
	:consumer_key => "consumer_key",
	:consumer_secret => "consumer_secret",
	:token => "access_key",
	:token_secret => "access_secret"
}
params = {
	'count' => "11",
	'since_id' => "5000"
}
oauth_header = SOAuth.header(uri, oauth, params)

Pretty straightforward. You can use whatever HTTP library you like, just use oauth_header as the "Authorization" HTTP header to your request (making sure the request info is the same info you passed to SOAuth). Say you were using NET::HTTP:

http_uri = URI.parse(uri)
request = Net::HTTP.new(http_uri.host, http_uri.port)
request.get(uri.request_uri, {'Authorization', oauth_header})

Why Would I Want This?

There's already a pretty nice OAuth library for Ruby out there. But I didn't want to have to use the OAuth library just to make my Authorization headers, and I wanted to be able to plug those headers into whatever HTTP library I wanted (in my case, Typhoeus). I found using the OAuth gem incredibly clunky/overkill for signing requests by hand, so I made SOAuth.

License

This program is free software; it is distributed under an MIT-style License.

Copyright (c) 2010 Matthew Riley MacPherson.