Question

I have a RoR app where I am authenticating against Google using omniauth and google_oauth2 where I am requesting offline access.

How do I use my refresh token to request a current access token? Also, how can I refresh my access token when it no longer works? I don’t want to have any user interface in this situation, assuming of course that the authorization hasn’t been taken away.

Answer 1

I don’t see anything in google_oauth2 that handles fetching a new access_token with a refresh token, so it looks like you’ll need to make the exchange directly.

Google’s official OAuth 2.0 documentation explains how to do this at a low level. Within your server-side code, use your favorite HTTP client to construct a request that looks like this:

POST /o/oauth2/token HTTP/1.1
Host: accounts.google.com
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

client_id=CLIENT_ID&
client_secret=CLIENT_SECRET&
refresh_token=REFRESH_TOKEN&
grant_type=refresh_token

where CLIENT_ID and CLIENT_SECRET are the same ones you used for the original authentication and REFRESH_TOKEN is the refresh token from the original authentication flow. If the exchange is successful, you’ll receive a fresh access token in a response that looks something like this:

{
  "access_token":"1/fFBGRNJru1FQd44AzqT3Zg",
  "expires_in":3920,
  "token_type":"Bearer",
}

You can follow this process to grab a new access token whenever you need one. You can either use the expires_in value to estimate when you will need a new one, or attempt a refresh whenever your API request responds with a 401 HTTP status.