--- title: Twitter Authentication OAuth 2 with omniauth and Rails slug: twitter-authentication-oauth-2-with-omniauth-and-rails published_at: 2022-07-06 12:00:34 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:30 +0000 summary: description: Learn how to authenticate users to the new v2 Twitter API using omniauth and the omniauth-twitter2 provider in a Ruby on Rails application. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/bookmarks-search-rails #rails #rubyonrails tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, omniauth, omniauth-twitter2, oauth2, oauth 2, api v2, twitter api v2] views: 4759 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/twitter-authentication-oauth-2-with-omniauth-and-rails youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgGFM4BdVSM youtube_id: kgGFM4BdVSM embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/kgGFM4BdVSM thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kgGFM4BdVSM/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Twitter Authentication OAuth 2 with omniauth and Rails *Published: July 06, 2022* *Views: 4759* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgGFM4BdVSM) [![Twitter Authentication OAuth 2 with omniauth and Rails](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kgGFM4BdVSM/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgGFM4BdVSM) ## Description Learn how to authenticate users to the new v2 Twitter API using omniauth and the omniauth-twitter2 provider in a Ruby on Rails application. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/bookmarks-search-rails #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript what's up everyone welcome back to another episode we're going to be using ruby on rails today to rebuild this bookmark search demo app so inside of the twitter dev github repo they have this demo showing how to build out bookmark search and so i downloaded it i've been playing around with it but it's got a node backend and it has a react front end and we like to use rails here oh no it's not going to actually work let's see uh so i wanted to just like hack around on it and play around with building it out with ruby on rails basically we're going to just create a way to pull in our bookmarks and then use the context annotations for tweets that that twitter gives us so we can build something like this so that it looks like we can log in with our twitter and it'll look something like it'll look something like this so we'll have sort of each of the bookmarks that we have created and then we can click on concepts or topics and it will filter out the the bookmarks that we have down to only those that that matter and these bookmarks or like the context annotation for tweets are based on some machine learning algorithms that twitter adds to the data that we get back from the the api so let's go through and build this out all right we're going to start with rails new rails new and we'll call it bookmark tool rails and we're going to use es build today tailwind postgres we're going to not use any tests and the main branch while this is installing what i want to do is take a look at the code that came as part of that demo that twitter gives us so we have a bunch of routes inside here this is using an express app on the server most of these routes are for oauth for using the setting up like all of the tokenization and getting tokens for the v2 or the second version of the the twitter api so a lot of these routes are for oauth and here we have a scope and the scope tells us kind of like what we have access to so we have tweet read users read bookmark read and offline access i have no idea what that offline access scope does but we'll just use it so that we can mirror what they have the only other thing that they have in this this this app that's kind of interesting is this request route which sort of just proxies the uh the twitter api passing in the token with uh just like bearer authentication with the token that came back from oauth 2. it's dropping in a user agent here i don't know if the user agent matters but um and then ultimately it's just kind of using fetch under the hood to make some requests out to the twitter api so we're gonna kind of like wrap all of this stuff up and try to rebuild it using ruby and using rails so we've got our rails app spun up here let's jump into um bookmark i don't know bookmark tool rails we'll open up package.json we'll drop in our script here and we should be off to the races i think we also do need to add a build script so that es build runs i have this blog post if you want to head over to cjav.dev and it kind of just goes through the entire process that i use for spinning up a brand new rails app the thing i wanted to copy was this line here so that i have my my build script that will run es build and run as expected the only other i don't know why that doesn't get dropped in as part of rails new i wonder if that's something we could like help with uh i'm gonna set my local node environment to 16.13.1 you may or may not need to do that um then i'm going to say bin railsdb create db migrate that should create a new database for our um for our app and migrate it if there is any migrations there are none so now i think we can say bin dev and cross our fingers and hope everything fires up it did not because ah yes okay so since i'm on an m1 mac i need to install this es build darwin arm so npm dash or npm install this thing okay now i should be able to run bin dev everything fires up nicely we can head over to localhost 3000 beautiful okay so now we've got a basic rails app running this is cool you've seen this a million times if you've watched this channel now let's add some authentication to twitter so we're going to add twitter authentication to a rails app so the first thing we want to do is we're going to use um the omnioff gem so i'm going to say bundle add omni off and i also want to add the omnioff gem for rails omni off with um what is it called omnioff rails csrf protection so we want this one for oauth 2. so actually we're just going to say bundle bundle add that thing so that we'll add that gem we also want to use this omni auth 2 uh strategy so this this gem here omni auth 2 i'm sorry omni off twitter too so bundle add omni off twitter too this is the omnioff strategy that we need for oauth 2 which is the authentication mechanism that the v2 of the twitter api uses okay now what we want to do is open up config initializers omniauth.rb and we want to set up omniauth so back here in the docs for omniauth we have a little thing that we can drop in so we'll just drop this in here now this provider is a sort of test provider that's in the in development mode um so let's take a look at what that actually gives us so we're going to need to restart the server since we changed some initializers and installed some gems now if we go over to localhost if we say off developer actually this isn't going to work because we need it needs to be a post request for um for oauth 2. so we actually need to we need some sort of controller that's going to manage our route if you follow the channel you know that i like to use a static pages controller so we'll say rails g controller static pages root it's going to create a controller for us some views so open up our routes and say we want to route to static pages and we're going to hit the root action of our static page if we go over to our static pages root this is going to be kind of where we land so in order to actually hit that route we do need a form that is going to make a post request to that route so here we have a form tag with auth slash developer the nice thing about going through the the setup flow for omnioff with the developer provider first is that it kind of lets us set up our sessions controller and get the kind of like one pass-through of the auth flow without trying to involve twitter at all so this first pass is really just kind of like setting up omni off and then in the second pass we'll set up the twitter provider so now we have we should have a form on the page we're using turbo falls here so it doesn't um sort of uh it doesn't um use javascript on the front end to um what does it um intercept the post request and then do its own thing with it so we're just saying like use the raw built-in uh browser stuff here so if we go over to localhost 3000 now now we have this button login with developer brings us to this page where you can say test test at example.com and click sign in and now we see no route matches post for auth developer callback so let's go to our routes file and we want to add a new route here called post and it's going to go to auth and then i think it's provider with a colon and then callback and what we want this to do is go to maybe sessions create so we need a new controller called the sessions controller and it will have a create method because we're doing a post request and this post this this post request to the callback is also part of oauth 2. so um the reason why i'm using a colon here in front of provider and i'm not just saying like slash auth slash developer callback is that developers going to be swapped out with whatever the name of the provider is that we end up using so that's going to be twitter too in this case it might in some cases be like google or facebook or whatever providers you're using those oauth providers that you're using with omniauth all right so let's go rails let's go generate a controller for our sessions and in our sessions controller we're gonna have a create method and again in the docs for omniauth here we're gonna see how we can access the data that is sent to us as part of that authentication request so here i'm actually just going to do binding.pry render json of user info and because this post request is coming from a third party we want to skip the csrf check that's going to happen so i'm going to say skip before filter verify authenticity token maybe only on create which that's it doesn't really matter because that's the only sort of action that we have here all right let's go back to our app and go through this process again um skip before action sure um it used to be called before filter all right binding now pri okay so user info all right so we've got some user info here this is great this is what we actually want from the provider so now we can actually access um some stuff that's coming in from the developer provider for omniauth we're at a good point now where we can actually like make this work with twitter so we're going to go back to our initializer for omni auth and we want to add a new provider here and the provider is going to be twitter 2 and the first thing we need to pass in is a client id the twitter client id and so this is going to be sort of like the client id client secret and then there's going to be some other stuff down here like the scope and the callback url etc but i wanted to just first talk about this client id and client secret so if you go over to developer.twitter.com you can go to the developer portal it's free you can sign up now it you can do like fully self onboarded so i have like a little project set up here and i have oauth 2 turned on so inside of oauth 2 which you will need for the v2 api you want to go down and pick the type of your app this should be web app so come down and pick web app and then enter the callback uri so this is going to be the one we're using here this was supposed to work with the demo that i was using earlier for the single page app but it seems i don't know for some reason it's not working so notice that i have twitter 2 here so it's going to be localhost three thousand slash off slash twitter two slash callback this is important because this is gonna be the route where at the end of that oauth process twitter is going to send a post request with the information about the authenticated user including their like token data so this is where we want to add that and then come down save and save once you once you set this up you will be given some um some tokens so you'll have you'll get like a client id and a client secret and those i think after the fact if you go to keys and tokens you can see yeah you'll be able to see your like client id and client secret so what i'm going to do is i'm going to store my client id and client secret in the rails credentials so that they're not exposed publicly so i'm going to say rails.application credentials twitter client id and then the same thing for the client uh secret so those are going to be the first two arguments let's actually just go double check inside of this provider here okay so now we want the callback path and the scope so the callback path is going to be this thing and the scope is going to be we want the scope to match whatever is in the demo so let's just copy what we have there um okay that should work fine okay all right is there anything else at the end here there's not so i think we should be ready to test this out oh actually we need to set our credentials first right okay so i'm going to say rails appli our rails credentials colon edit this will open up the credential editor now i don't have anything in here yet so i'm going to say twitter client id and client secret so you should you should fill these in from what you see in the dashboard again the developer dashboard with like your client id and your client secret here i'm going to drop mine in and with the magic of whatever editing it'll be populated i'm going to close this file so you can't see and we should be good to go all right since we changed some stuff inside of our credentials let's restart the server and let's head back over to our localhost 3000 and then instead of log in with developer let's update our route to have maybe another form here that has login with twitter and our auth is going to be off slash twitter 2 and we'll refresh this page now we have a log in with twitter button we'll click on that all right we are brought to this page if for some reason you don't see this page that's asking you to authorize the app there's a couple different things that you can do to debug one of one of which is that your redirect uri might be a little bit different so if for some reason you've changed the redirect uri like check on that if you see just a generic page you can also open up the terminal or like i'm sorry open up the dev tools go to the network tab and look at this like client event thing or look at the requests and there will be one that has failed in fact let me let me just fail this for you so you can see what i'm talking about so like if for some reason it says something went wrong you can come in here and look at this this um this request that failed authorized code and then it says the value you pass for the redirect uri did not match the uri of the authorization code and then you can know like okay i've got to fix the redirect uri so that it has like the right auth twitter to inside of here so now uh whatever you get the idea all right localhost 3000 come back over here log in with twitter authorize the app and oh we're redirected back but it says no route matches get for auth twitter 2 callback okay so apparently um some of the some of the providers are going to post and some of them are going to get so let's go to our routes and then we want to make this work for both post and uh get so we'll refresh the page okay now it kind of like timed out so we need to like go back through the whole flow again all right log in with twitter authorized app we're redirected back and this user info might have some good stuff in it oh nice okay cool so this is like this is my actual user info i've got a bunch here i've got some information about the credentials so this is going to be the actual token and refresh token that i can use to make api requests on behalf of myself or whatever user just authenticated so i could say something like user info.credentials.token or dot expires at so that's going to give us a unix timestamp i can also say userinfo.uid that should give me my twitter user id i think i can also say something like nick name no maybe userinfo dot methods uh user info.keys okay so i've got provider info okay so userinfo.info.nickname cool so that's going to give me my twitter handle that name should give me my actual name fantastic all right so that's kind of like all the data that we actually need so if i just say like user info json.pretty generate let's see what that does oh gosh that's gross all right so let's just look at user info okay so sneaky hash what the heck i don't think i've ever seen that snakey hash okay all right so uh let's go and figure out how to store this user in the database so that they can um we can keep track of their tokens and refresh tokens and then make authentic or make authenticated requests on their behalf all right so let's go generate a new user so we're going to say rails g model user and it's going to have the twitter id the nickname name token refresh token expires at and what else do we want maybe their i don't know if we want their profile image or something um let's see user info dot info yeah is this image what does this give us oh it's so tiny it's so tiny um okay there's probably a way to get like the bigger photo or whatever but we'll just use this for now this should get us far enough so let's open up this create users thing um so expires is actually going to be a date time so make that a date time we want to make sure that all users have a twitter id entered and then the name token and refresh token thing are going to change over time so i think this is this is a good start so we'll say rails db migrate and okay so now we want to open up our sessions controller this is where that user info data is available again we can take out our binding.prime we want to do something where it's like if the user um if we've already seen this user we want to like update their stuff otherwise create a new user and either way we want to like cookie the user and store their session um whatever we want to like store them in the session so we're going to say something like you is user maybe like or let's say at user is user.find by twitter id is userinfo.uid and then something like if at user.nil then we're going to go into this case okay so if the user is nil then we want to create a new user at user is user dot create and this is gonna have the twitter id is user info.uid nickname name token refresh token expires at all right let's see if we can get these so user info.info.nickname userinfo.info.name userinfo.credentials.com refresh token and userinfo.i think at userinfo.credentials.expiresat this this is giving us back a unix time stamp but we need to say like time dot at that unix timestamp dot to date time so that we can put it in the database nicely i think we want to say something like time dot at uh credentials.expiresat to date time okay otherwise i guess we kind of did did these backwards but whatever so um uh yeah so if we've already seen the user we want to update their tokens we're going to say at user.update i think update bang is a thing i don't know 3y boom okay all right so that should update their token now we want to cookie the user so we're going to say session user id is at user.id that will make it so that we can look up the current user later so let's see if this wants to work so we're going to go and say we want to log in with twitter we're going to click on authorize the app we'll redirect back we're just we're still printing out user info down here we should probably just like redirect to maybe yeah redirect to bookmarks which doesn't exist yet but like ideally that's where we end up going to uh is this page what we can do is we can jump over to the rails console so i can say bin rail c to open up the rails console and i can say user.count and we have one user in the database so let's make sure that user.last has what we need it does so it has the id the handle the name and then it has the token refresh token and when that token expires which looks like it's in about two hours so pretty short expiration but we can use this refresh token to refresh and get a new token if and when that token expires okay cool so now we've got a user we're able to log in um so yeah i think we're looking pretty good with twitter authentication we should be able to use this token by the way so if i just actually cat like user.last.token here then i should be able to take this and say something like curl dash x um actually we just want to make a get to api.twitter.com two users me with the header of auth authentication authorization bearer with our api key oh look at that boom we get back ourselves okay so um that proves that sort of the token is working we're getting back our stuff this 3 2 3 1 2 4 8 whatever should match what we have here it does so now we know that this token is working i think we're going to wrap there and in the next episode we'll go through and talk about how we can use these tokens to build a a little client we'll build a little twitter client for making api calls out to twitter there is not there is an old gem that works with the v1 twitter api but there's not i wasn't able to find a new gem so we're just going to roll our own using rest client so stick around and take a look at that thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one [Music] you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## 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