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
Apr 3, 2024Technology
Test Analysis at the Product Level

Test analysis is an essential and crucial activity in the testing process. A well-organized test analysis provides an adequate level of confidence in the overall effectiveness of the testing and contributes to the delivery of high-quality software.

Aug 18, 2022Technology
5 Best Practices of RESTful API Design to Keep Your Users Happy

Dive into our guide to RESTful API best practices

Jul 21, 2022Technology
Codemirror: unit-testing codemirror react components

One of our recent projects includes the functionality of an inline code editor. This code editor needed to be highly extensible and have custom features. To address this, we chose Codemirror v6 due to its peculiar architecture - it is highly customizable, and all the additional features are provided into codemirror engine as Extension objects.

Jun 14, 2017Technology
How to Deploy a Django Application on Heroku?

In this article I'll show you how to deploy Django with Celery and Postgres to Heroku.

Mar 4, 2011Technology
Css sprite generation

I've created this small sprite to create css sprites. It glues images from directory directory into single file and generates corresponding css.

Sep 23, 2010Technology
Dynamic class generation, QuerySetManager and use_for_related_fields

It appears that not everyone knows that in python you can create classes dynamically without metaclasses. I'll show an example of how to do it.So we've learned how to use custom QuerySet to chain requests:Article.objects.old().public()Now we need to make it work for related objects:user.articles.old().public()This is done using use_for_related_fields, but it needs a little trick.