Question

do I need an oauth provider for my web site if I’m using google API?

That is:

• have a web site I’m building
• want users to be able to access google calendar but via oauth approach

Do I need to implement the Oauth “Provider” in my web application? Or is it only the consumer I need?

I’m not quite sure if the Provider is:

a) something that the hosting provider (e.g. google in this case) implements
b) or whether I’ll need it to accept the call back response from google

So another way to ask the question perhaps is, when a user goes to my site, gets redirected to google, now when google has to redirect back to my website, is the callback to my app handled by an “OAuth Provider”? or is it just part of the OAuth consumer to accept the callback?

PS. Not specific to this question, but I’m using Ruby on Rails with the oauth GEM and plugin

Answer 1

it’s the consumer that handles the callback. Google is/has the provider, and your app is the consumer.