Learning Python Network Programming

APIs in Action

Authenticating requests

We now have enough information for authenticating requests. Twitter uses an
authentication standard called oAuth, version 1.0a. It's described in detail at
http://oauth.net/core/1.0a/.

The oAuth authentication standard is a little tricky, but fortunately the Requests
module has a companion library called requests-oauthlib, which can handle most
of the complexity for us. This is available on PyPi, so we can download and install it
with pip.

$ pip install requests-oauthlib
Downloading/unpacking requests-oauthlib

Now, we can add authentication to our requests, and then write our application.

A Twitter client

Save the code mentioned here to a file, and save it as twitter_worldclock.py.
You'll need to replace , , ,
and with the values that you have taken down from the
aforementioned Twitter app configuration:

import requests, requests_oauthlib, sys

consumer_key = '<CONSUMER_KEY>'

consumer_secret = '<CONSUMER_SECRET>'

access_token = '<ACCESS_TOKEN>'

access_secret = '<ACCESS_KEY>'

def init_auth():

auth_obj = requests_oauthlib.OAuth1(

consumer_key, consumer_secret,

access_token, access_secret)

if verify_credentials(auth_obj):

print('Validated credentials OK')

return auth_obj

else:

print('Credentials validation failed')

sys.exit(1)

def verify_credentials(auth_obj):

url = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/' \

'account/verify_credentials.json'

response = requests.get(url, auth=auth_obj)

return response.status_code == 200