James Duffy

Twitter Authentication in Django with Tweepy

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While working on a recent project during my internship I had to come up with a way to authenticate users in our Django application. We use an Angular front-end that makes calls to Django.

I am going to strip out all the angular magic, but seriously. You need to go check it out. It makes building front-end applications in the browser stupid easy with just a little of javascript know how.

First off go make sure you check out the Tweepy documentation. I found it extremely helpful.

I am assuming you can set up the Django urls.py file yourself. We have at least two routes we need to make.

  1. Start Twitter Authentication
  2. Callback from Twitter

In our first view we need to do a few things. We need to set up our twitter application’s consumer token, consumer secret and the callback url.

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auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler('consumer_token', 'consumer_secret', 'callback_url')

This authenticates your application with twitter so you can later authenticate a user. To authenticate a user you need to redirect them to twitter’s website to accept logging into your application. Tweepy has an easy way to get this url using .get_authorization_url(). You should wrap any calls to outside services in try/except because you can never be sure when they will fail because of no fault of your own and when it does you can show a nice error message rather than everything crashing to a halt.

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try:
    redirect_url = auth.get_authorization_url()
    except tweedy.TweepError:
        return HttpResponse('error', status=500)

Your finished view file should look something like this:

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import tweepy


def twitterAuthenticate(request):
    auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler('consumer_token', 'consumer_secret', 'callback_url')

    try:
        redirect_url = auth.get_authorization_url()
     except tweepy.TweepError:
        return HttpResponse('error', status=500)

    request.session['request_token'] = (auth.request_token.key, auth.request_token.secret)

    return HttpResponseRedirect(redirect_url)

def twitterAuthorizeCallback(request):
    verifier = request.GET.get('oauth_verifier')

    auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler('consumer_token', 'consumer_secret')

    token = request.session.get('request_token')
    request.session.delete('request_token')
    auth.set_request_token(token[0], token[1])

    try:
        token = auth.get_access_token(verifier)
    except tweepy.TweepError:
        return HttpResponse('error', status=500)

    response_data = {}
    response_data['key'] = auth.access_token.key
    response_data['secret'] = auth.access_token.secret

    response = 'you are now authenticated'

    return HttpResponse(response)