Using the Client

Are you using requests?

If you are, then you should take a look at requests-oauthlib which has several examples of how to use OAuth1 with requests.

Signing a request with an HMAC-SHA1 signature (most common)

See requests-oauthlib for more detailed examples of going through the OAuth workflow. In a nutshell you will be doing three types of requests, to obtain a request token, to obtain an access token and to access a protected resource.

Obtaining a request token will require client key and secret which are provided to you when registering a client with the OAuth provider:

client = oauthlib.oauth1.Client('client_key', client_secret='your_secret')
uri, headers, body = client.sign('http://example.com/request_token')

You will then need to redirect to the authorization page of the OAuth provider, which will later redirect back with a verifier and a token secret parameter appended to your callback url. These will be used in addition to the credentials from before when obtaining an access token:

client = oauthlib.oauth1.Client('client_key', client_secret='your_secret',
    resource_owner_key='the_request_token', resource_owner_secret='the_request_token_secret',
    verifier='the_verifier')
uri, headers, body = client.sign('http://example.com/access_token')

The provider will now give you an access token and a new token secret which you will use to access protected resources:

client = oauthlib.oauth1.Client('client_key', client_secret='your_secret',
    resource_owner_key='the_access_token', resource_owner_secret='the_access_token_secret')
uri, headers, body = client.sign('http://example.com/protected_resource')

Unicode Everywhere

Starting with 0.3.5 OAuthLib supports automatic conversion to unicode if you supply input in utf-8 encoding. If you are using another encoding you will have to make sure to convert all input to unicode before passing it to OAuthLib. Note that the automatic conversion is limited to the use of oauthlib.oauth1.Client.

Request body

The OAuth 1 spec only covers signing of x-www-url-formencoded information.

For convenience, you can pass body data in one of three ways:

  • a dictionary
  • an iterable of 2-tuples
  • a properly-formatted x-www-url-formencoded string

If you are sending some other kind of data in the body, an additional oauth_body_hash parameter will be included with the request. This parameter provides an integrity check on non-formencoded request bodies.

IMPORTANT This extension is forward compatible: Service Providers that have not implemented this extension can verify requests sent by Consumers that have implemented this extension. If the Service Provider implements this specification the integrity of the body is guaranteed. If the Service Provider does not check body signatures, the remainder of the request will still validate using the OAuth Core signature algorithm.

RSA Signatures

OAuthLib supports ‘RSA-SHA1’ signatures, but does not install the PyJWT or cryptography dependencies by default. OAuthLib uses the PyJWT package to smooth out its internal code. The cryptography package is much better supported on Windows and Mac OS X than PyCrypto, and simpler to install. Users can install PyJWT and cryptography using pip:

pip install pyjwt cryptography

When you have cryptography and PyJWT installed, using RSA signatures is similar to HMAC but differ in a few aspects. RSA signatures does not make use of client secrets nor resource owner secrets (token secrets) and requires you to specify the signature type when constructing a client:

client = oauthlib.oauth1.Client('your client key',
    signature_method=oauthlib.oauth1.SIGNATURE_RSA,
    resource_owner_key='a token you have obtained',
    rsa_key=open('your_private_key.pem').read())

Plaintext signatures

OAuthLib supports plaintext signatures and they are identical in use to HMAC-SHA1 signatures except that you will need to set the signature_method when constructing Clients:

client = oauthlib.oauth1.Client('your client key',
    client_secret='your secret',
    resource_owner_key='a token you have obtained',
    resource_owner_secret='a token secret',
    signature_method=oauthlib.oauth1.SIGNATURE_PLAINTEXT)

Where to put the signature? Signature types

OAuth 1 commonly use the Authorization header to pass the OAuth signature and other OAuth parameters. This is the default setting in Client and need not be specified. However you may also use the request url query or the request body to pass the parameters. You can specify this location using the signature_type constructor parameter, as shown below:

>>> # Embed in Authorization header (recommended)
>>> client = oauthlib.oauth1.Client('client_key',
        signature_type=SIGNATURE_TYPE_AUTH_HEADER,
    )

>>> uri, headers, body = client.sign('http://example.com/path?query=hello')
>>> headers
{u'Authorization': u'OAuth oauth_nonce="107143098223781054691360095427", oauth_timestamp="1360095427", oauth_version="1.0", oauth_signature_method="HMAC-SHA1", oauth_consumer_key="client_key", oauth_signature="86gpxY1DUXSBRRyWnRNJekeWEzw%3D"'}

>>> # Embed in url query
>>> client = oauthlib.oauth1.Client('client_key',
        signature_type=SIGNATURE_TYPE_QUERY,
    )

>>> uri, headers, body = client.sign('http://example.com/path?query=hello')
>>> uri
http://example.com/path?query=hello&oauth_nonce=97599600646423262881360095509&oauth_timestamp=1360095509&oauth_version=1.0&oauth_signature_method=HMAC-SHA1&oauth_consumer_key=client_key&oauth_signature=VQAib%2F4uRPwfVmCZkgSE3q2p7zU%3D

>>> # Embed in body
>>> client = oauthlib.oauth1.Client('client_key',
        signature_type=SIGNATURE_TYPE_BODY,
    )

>>> # Please set content-type to application/x-www-form-urlencoded
>>> headers = {'Content-Type':oauthlib.oauth1.CONTENT_TYPE_FORM_URLENCODED}
>>> uri, headers, body = client.sign('http://example.com/path?query=hello',
                                     headers=headers)
>>> body
u'oauth_nonce=148092408248153282511360095722&oauth_timestamp=1360095722&oauth_version=1.0&oauth_signature_method=HMAC-SHA1&oauth_consumer_key=client_key&oauth_signature=5IKjrRKU3%2FIduI9UumVI%2FbQ0Hv0%3D'