Question

I’ve been stuck on this for awhile. Does anyone know how to authenticate the Twitter Streaming API requests using OAuth? As of right now I’m authenticating via Basic Authentication, and I would like to completely switch over to OAuth. Also, I’m using Ruby on Rails if that helps.

Thanks

Answer 1

Connecting to the Twitter Streaming API via OAuth is done much the same as connecting via the REST API. Assuming you’ve already negotiated an access token, you sign and issue the request using the same signing algorithm as for a REST request. With the Streaming API, it’s best to use header-based OAuth rather than query-string based.

Here’s an example of a signed OAuth-based request for the sample end point:

GET http://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/sample.json

Signature Base String example:

GET&http%3A%2F%2Fstream.twitter.com%2Fstatuses%2Fsample.json&oauth_consumer_key%3Dri8JxYK2ddwSV5xIUfNNvQ%26oauth_nonce%3DUJb0f3nHhFQkpkWkJzxnFT65xX1TZeuGjww6Q2XWs4%26oauth_signature_method%3DHMAC-SHA1%26oauth_timestamp%3D1306947138%26oauth_token%3D819797-torCkTs0XK7H2Y2i1ee5iofqkMC4p7aayeEXRTmlw%26oauth_version%3D1.0

Authorization Header after signing:

Authorization: OAuth oauth_consumer_key=”ri8JxYK2ddwSV5xIUfNNvQ”, oauth_nonce=”UJb0f3nHhFQkpkWkJzxnFT65xX1TZeuGjww6Q2XWs4″, oauth_signature=”bN14zlBIdCZCSl9%2B8UV8dB2VWjI%3D”, oauth_signature_method=”HMAC-SHA1″, oauth_timestamp=”1306947138″, oauth_token=”819797-torCkTs0XK7H2Y2i1ee5iofqkMC4p7aayeEXRTmlw”, oauth_version=”1.0″

Matt Harris has some sample code in PHP demonstrating connecting to the streaming API via OAuth: https://github.com/themattharris/tmhOAuth/blob/master/examples/streaming.php