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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T00:50:47+00:00

I am trying to build an application where a user can specify a URL

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I am trying to build an application where a user can specify a URL for a website and my page will go to that URL and grab information. If the URL requires user authentication to access the information, then I want to use OAuth 1.0 to be able to do that.

The problem is, and I see this skimped over in OAuth tutorials, as far as I can tell my application has to already, somehow, be registered with the page I am requesting information from. My understanding is that for any page I want my users to be able to use, I have to go to the page individually by myself and register my application. Once that’s done, it will give me a consumer key and secret that I hardcode into my page, and then use those when I am accessing the request URL, authorization URL, and access URL. This is, of course, no good for me because I want my users to be able to specify arbitrary pages to access information on and then provide their credentials to those pages in order to give my app access to the information on them.

Additionally, from what I can tell, there are three URLs that I need to know:

  • The request URL, which I send my consumer key/secret pair to in order to receive a new, unauthorized request token.
  • The authorization URL, which I direct the user to with query arguments for the request token and the oauth_callback. The user will be redirected out of my webpage, log in to the foreign site, grant me access, and then be redirected back to the URL specified in oauth_callback with information regarding whether or not they authorized my request.
  • The access URL, which I send the authorized request token to, expecting to get an access token in return.

And then, once I have all those, I can use the access key/secret pair as a username and password. I store them in a cookie related to the user, and use them henceforth whenever I am access information on the website. On the website’s end of the deal, it will look for that information in my request, and if I include it properly then I will be allowed to access whatever of the user’s data I please.

Is what I am trying to do – give generic OAuth access to websites – possible, or is it required that I, as the application owner, register my application with the server in order to get OAuth access to it? If it is possible, then how do I get that request URL, authorization URL, and access URL?

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  1. Editorial Team

    It’s not really possible. Here’s the short list of problems you will encounter:

    1. You need to have application tokens (e.g. your application registered with the resource owner) for all websites. It’s not something you can do on the fly
    2. Inconsistent OAuth URL schemes from different resource owners. Twitter has a different URL structure for OAuth than Google does which is different than Foursquare. It’s not really possible to figure out the URLs without hardcoding it
    3. Scopes. When you do OAuth registration for many resource owners, you need to specify a scope. How will you know what the scope should be
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