Implementing Sign in with Twitter

Overview

The browser and mobile web implementations of Sign in with Twitter are based off of OAuth. This page demonstrates the requests needed to obtain an access token for the sign in flow.

To use the “Sign in with Twitter” flow, please go to your application settings and ensure that the “Allow this application to be used to Sign in with Twitter?” option is enabled.

This page assumes that the reader knows how to sign requests using the OAuth 1.0a protocol. If you want to know how to sign a request, read the Authorizing a request page.

If you want to check the signing of the requests on this page, the consumer secret used is:

L8qq9PZyRg6ieKGEKhZolGC0vJWLw8iEJ88DRdyOg

This value has been disabled and will not work for real requests.

Step 1: Obtaining a request token

To start a sign in flow, your application must obtain a request token by sending a signed message to POST oauth / request_token. The only unique parameter in this request is oauth_callback, which must be a URL-encoded version of the URL you wish your user to be redirected to when they complete step 2. The remaining parameters are added by the OAuth signing process.

Example request (Authorization header has been wrapped):

POST /oauth/request_token HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: themattharris' HTTP Client
Host: api.twitter.com
Accept: */*
Authorization: 
        OAuth oauth_callback="http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%2Fsign-in-with-twitter%2F",
              oauth_consumer_key="cChZNFj6T5R0TigYB9yd1w",
              oauth_nonce="ea9ec8429b68d6b77cd5600adbbb0456",
              oauth_signature="F1Li3tvehgcraF8DMJ7OyxO4w9Y%3D",
              oauth_signature_method="HMAC-SHA1",
              oauth_timestamp="1318467427",
              oauth_version="1.0"

Your application should examine the HTTP status of the response. Any value other than 200 indicates a failure. The body of the response will contain the oauth_token, oauth_token_secret, and oauth_callback_confirmed parameters. Your application should verify that oauth_callback_confirmed is true and store the other two values for the next steps.

Example response (response body has been wrapped):

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:57:06 GMT
Status: 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 146
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: Tue, 31 Mar 1981 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Server: tfe

oauth_token=NPcudxy0yU5T3tBzho7iCotZ3cnetKwcTIRlX0iwRl0&
oauth_token_secret=veNRnAWe6inFuo8o2u8SLLZLjolYDmDP7SzL0YfYI&
oauth_callback_confirmed=true

Step 2: Redirecting the user

The next step is to direct the user to Twitter so that they may complete the appropriate flow, as described in Browser sign in flow. Direct the user to GET oauth / authenticate, and the request token obtained in step 1 should be passed as the oauth_token parameter.

The most seamless way for a website to implement this would be to issue a HTTP 302 redirect as the response to the original “sign in” request. Mobile and desktop apps should open a new browser window or direct to the URL via an embedded web view.

Example URL to redirect to:

https://api.twitter.com/oauth/authenticate?oauth_token=NPcudxy0yU5T3tBzho7iCotZ3cnetKwcTIRlX0iwRl0

The sign in endpoint will behave in one of three ways depending on the user’s status:

1. Signed in and approved: If the user is signed in on twitter.com and has already approved the calling application, they will be immediately authenticated and returned to the callback URL with a valid OAuth request token. The redirect to twitter.com is not obvious to the user.
2. Signed in but not approved: If the user is signed in to twitter.com but has not approved the calling application, a request to share access with the calling application will be shown. After accepting the authorization request, the user will be redirected to the callback URL with a valid OAuth request token.
3. Not signed in: If the user is not signed in on twitter.com, they will be prompted to enter their credentials and grant access for the application to access their information on the same screen. Once signed in, the user will be returned to the callback URL with a valid OAuth request token.

The possible states for the sign in interaction are illustrated in the following flowchart:

Upon a successful authentication, your callback_url would receive a request containing the oauth_token and oauth_verifier parameters. Your application should verify that the token matches the request token received in step 1.

Request from client’s redirect (querystring parameters wrapped):

GET /sign-in-with-twitter/?
        oauth_token=NPcudxy0yU5T3tBzho7iCotZ3cnetKwcTIRlX0iwRl0&
        oauth_verifier=uw7NjWHT6OJ1MpJOXsHfNxoAhPKpgI8BlYDhxEjIBY HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/535.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.891.1 Safari/535.5
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Referer: http://localhost/sign-in-with-twitter/
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3

Step 3: Converting the request token to an access token

To render the request token into a usable access token, your application must make a request to the POST oauth / access_token endpoint, containing the oauth_verifier value obtained in step 2. The request token is also passed in the oauth_token portion of the header, but this will have been added by the signing process.

Example request (Authorization header wrapped):

POST /oauth/access_token HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: themattharris' HTTP Client
Host: api.twitter.com
Accept: */*
Authorization: OAuth oauth_consumer_key="cChZNFj6T5R0TigYB9yd1w",
                     oauth_nonce="a9900fe68e2573b27a37f10fbad6a755",
                     oauth_signature="39cipBtIOHEEnybAR4sATQTpl2I%3D",
                     oauth_signature_method="HMAC-SHA1",
                     oauth_timestamp="1318467427",
                     oauth_token="NPcudxy0yU5T3tBzho7iCotZ3cnetKwcTIRlX0iwRl0",
                     oauth_version="1.0"
Content-Length: 57
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

oauth_verifier=uw7NjWHT6OJ1MpJOXsHfNxoAhPKpgI8BlYDhxEjIBY

A successful response contains the oauth_token, oauth_token_secret parameters. The token and token secret should be stored and used for future authenticated requests to the Twitter API. To determine the identity of the user, use GET account / verify_credentials.

Example response (response body has been wrapped):

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:57:08 GMT
Status: 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 157
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: Tue, 31 Mar 1981 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Server: tfe

oauth_token=7588892-kagSNqWge8gB1WwE3plnFsJHAZVfxWD7Vb57p0b4&
oauth_token_secret=PbKfYqSryyeKDWz4ebtY3o5ogNLG11WJuZBc9fQrQo