Question

Rails has the rest autho plugin which works well but is there a solution for incorporating twitter, facebook, google, yahoo, etc…

Seems like each on has its own plugin and demands and mixing them is going to be a mess.

This is for logging in users like how Stackoverflow gets things done not for using the robust features of the APIs.

What I want to do is do what stackoverflow did for login but in rails.

Answer 1

It’s not too difficult to write your own controller code to connect to each of these services and redirect. For example, to authenticate to twitter using oauth takes two actions and about 20 lines of code total.

Keep the code for each service separate in it’s own controller.

def twitter_oauth
  o = Twitter::OAuth.new(your_twitter_consumer_token, your_twitter_consumer_secret, :authorize_path => '/oauth/authenticate', :sign_in => true)
  o.set_callback_url(twitter_cb_url)
  session[:twitter_oauth_request_token] = o.request_token.token
  session[:twitter_oauth_request_secret] = o.request_token.secret
  redirect_to o.request_token.authorize_url
end

def twitter_oauth_cb
  o = Twitter::OAuth.new(your_twitter_consumer_token, your_twitter_consumer_secret, :authorize_path => '/oauth/authenticate', :sign_in => true)
  if params[:denied]
    redirect_to root_url
  elsif params[:oauth_verifier]
    o.authorize_from_request(session[:twitter_oauth_request_token], 
                             session[:twitter_oauth_request_secret],
                             params[:oauth_verifier])
    # look up this user in the db by o.access_token.token 
    # is the user not found? create them, save their token
    # log them in - UserSession.create(user, true)
    redirect_to root_url
  end
end