I don't work on SOAuth anymore, though that may soon change. In the meantime, if you're looking for a Ruby library to easily generate OAuth headers for your requests: check out ROAuth.
SOAuth is a Ruby library that creates HTTP headers for OAuth Authorization using previously-obtained OAuth keys/secrets. Useful if you want to make your own HTTP request objects instead of using the ones created for you using the commonly-used OAuth gem.
It should be noted that this was developed without edge cases in mind -- it was pretty much abstracted from my "by-hand" signing of OAuth requests in Prey Fetcher, so don't consider it production-quality code (though it is running in production).
Please fork away and send me a pull request if you think you can make it better or handle more use cases.
Install like any other Ruby gem:
gem install soauth
Create an OAuth header by specifying the URI of the resource you're requesting, your consumer key/secret + access key/secret in a hash, and -- optionally -- any GET params in another hash. Check it out:
uri = 'https://twitter.com/direct_messages.json'
oauth = {
:consumer_key => "consumer_key",
:consumer_secret => "consumer_secret",
:token => "access_key",
:token_secret => "access_secret"
}
params = {
'count' => "11",
'since_id' => "5000"
}
oauth_header = SOAuth.header(uri, oauth, params)
Pretty straightforward. You can use whatever HTTP library you like, just use oauth_header as the "Authorization" HTTP header to your request (making sure the request info is the same info you passed to SOAuth). Say you were using NET::HTTP:
http_uri = URI.parse(uri)
request = Net::HTTP.new(http_uri.host, http_uri.port)
request.get(uri.request_uri, {'Authorization', oauth_header})
There's already a pretty nice OAuth library for Ruby out there. But I didn't want to have to use the OAuth library just to make my Authorization headers, and I wanted to be able to plug those headers into whatever HTTP library I wanted (in my case, Typhoeus). I found using the OAuth gem incredibly clunky/overkill for signing requests by hand, so I made SOAuth.
This program is free software; it is distributed under an MIT-style License.
Copyright (c) 2010 Matthew Riley MacPherson.