Back
May 12, 2010

Twitter API, OAuth and decorators

In my current project I had a task to use twitter API. Twitter uses OAuth for authentication, which is pretty dreary. To avoid fiddling with it all the time, I've moved authentication to decorator, now it looks like this:

@twitter_api
def tweet_hello(request, api):
    api.update_status('hello')
# ...

Decorator checks if key is available, and, if needed - initiates authentication. User is redirected to twitter, grants permission and is redirected back to site, to the same place where he left off. If key is available - nothing happens, just view is launched as usual.

It's convenient that there's no need for additional twitter settings in user profile.

tweepy is used as an API wrapper.

def twitter_api(view):
    def wrapped(request, args, *kwargs):
        callback_url = absolute_url(oauth_endpoint)
        auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, callback_url)

        if 'twitter_access_token' in request.session:
            key, secret =     request.session['twitter_access_token']
            auth.set_access_token(key, secret)
            return view(request, api=tweepy.API(auth), *args, **kwargs)

        request.session['twitter_action'] = request.path
        redirect_url = auth.get_authorization_url()
        request.session['twitter_request_token'] = (auth.request_token.key, auth.request_token.secret)
        return redirect(redirect_url)

    return wrapped


def oauth_endpoint(request):
    callback_url = absolute_url(oauth_endpoint)
    auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, callback_url)
    key, secret = request.session.pop('twitter_request_token')
    auth.set_request_token(key, secret)
    verifier = request.REQUEST.get('oauth_verifier')
    auth.get_access_token(verifier)
    request.session['twitter_access_token'] = (auth.access_token.key, auth.access_token.secret)
    return redirect(request.session.pop('twitter_action'))
  • of course, you need to wrap everything in try..except blocks and process errors accordingly
  • absolute_url should return full url, with http://
  • apart from request.path you can also store POST and GET.
  • path can be passed as an argument to callback_url

Subscribe for the news and updates

More thoughts
May 5, 2023Technology
The best CSS trends for 2023

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) made its debut in 1996 and continue to be an indispensable and evolving component of web development. We will examine the most valuable recent and upcoming characteristics in CSS for this year.

Jul 27, 2022Technology
Forge Viewer: Our Experience with an Unusual Project

Once we received an interesting task from a client. They needed to allow their users to upload a 3D model of the building and show it in a timelapse video from the construction site.

Jan 10, 2017Technology
How To Use GraphQL with Angular 2 (with Example)

​In this article we will tell you about the basics of working with GraphQL in Angular 2 environment with detailed example.

Dec 1, 2016Technology
How to Use Django & PostgreSQL for Full Text Search

For any project there may be a need to use a database full-text search. We expect high speed and relevant results from this search. When we face such problem, we usually think about Solr, ElasticSearch, Sphinx, AWS CloudSearch, etc. But in this article we will talk about PostgreSQL. Starting from version 8.3, a full-text search support in PostgreSQL is available. Let's look at how it is implemented in the DBMS itself.

Oct 11, 2010Technology
Testing authentication in Django

In order to check if user is authentcated in test, you can run:

Feb 18, 2010Technology
Business logic in models

In my recent project there was a lot of data business logic, so I had to organize this code somehow. In this article I'll describe a few hints on how to it.