PreHack-How2API

Code for short workshop demonstrating basic API usage

#General tips

• Read the API documentation! In order to find out what you can do, you can study a detailed list of the available commands. For example posting to Facebook.
• A common serialisation format for responses is JSON, it resembles a dictionary but stored as a string and it is easy to convert between JSON and dictionaries in Python with the json module.

import json

some_json = '''{
  'name' : 'Dave',
  'occupation' : 'derp'
}'''

json_as_dict = json.loads(some_json)
#=> { u'name' : u'Dave', u'occupation' : u'derp' }

a_dict = {
  'name' : 'James',
  'occupation' : 'aardvark'
}

dict_as_json = json.dumps(a_dict)
#=> "{ 'name' : 'James', 'occupation' : 'aardvark' }"

#OAuth2

Running the demos

Step 0: Clone me!

Clone this repository to the local machine with $ git clone https://github.com/cronin101/PreHack-How2API.git

Step 1: Requirements

First, we are going to set up a virtual python environment using virtualenv. See how/why to use here.

Run the following commands:

$ virtualenv ENV

$ source ENV/bin/activate

Next, install the required packages for the python OAuth server with $ pip install -r requirements.txt.

Step 2: Getting OAuth tokens

Run ./oauth_server.py with $ python ./oauth_server.py.

This starts the Flask server, used to interact with OAuth providers, on port 8080.

You can now navigate to the server's root page for further prompts.

Clicking on the OAuth-flow trigger for each provider will prompt you to sign in and give permissions to the Python application.

After permissions are granted, a $provider_oauth.token file will be created in the current directory, this can be used for authenticated request later.

Step 3: Using the OAuth tokens

Once Facebook/GitHub OAuth tokens have been stored in a .token file, you can run the corresponding demo.

Eg $ python ./facebook_demo.py.

The Python application now has the ability to perform actions on the vendor API as the user that granted permissions without the need to store usernames/passwords. Magic!

To discover the full host of available actions, navigated to the linked API docs—commented within the oauth_server file.