nicholasdejong.com

Recently Twitter has thrown the switch and killed basic-auth authentication for interaction with their Twitter API. This means you can no longer simply use cURL in the following manner to make status updates etc:-

curl --silent --user 'username:password' --data status='Hello World' 
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/update.json

You must now use their OAuth interface to do all the authentication and it's no surprise that OAuth is a more painful than a simple username/password mechanism. Make no mistake OAuth is good stuff it's just a lot to understand when you first see it.

The libraries that Twitter point to for PHP to are Abraham Williams TwitterOAuth wrapper which does a fine job of making life easy working with Twitter's OAuth. But there is still a hicup or sorts...

If you are a user that just wants to use the Twitter API in "single user mode" that is, you don't want to build an application that has the ability to make Twitter API calls on behalf of other users then the whole OAuth thing will seem like total overkill.

None the less OAuth is the way Twitter auth needs to be done so you either need to get in there and learn/understand it all or find some some other way. To that end I've put together a handy little console helper tool and wrapper to make life with Twitter OAuth even easier for developers that just want "single user mode" style functionality with the API.

The console tool guides a user through creating a twitteroauth.credentials file which can be used on it's own if you'd like. The wrapper class then makes use of the twitteroauth.credentials file that deals with with setting everything else up so then using the Twitter API is now almost as simple as it was in the days of basic-auth.

For example to send a tweet:-

include('twitteroauth-helper-wrapper.php');
$TOHW = new TwitterOAuthWrapper('/path/to/credentials.file');
$TOHW->post('statuses/update',array('status'=>'Hello World!'));

Which is about as easy as the old-school http-auth way... and you do not have to have to learn anything about OAuth - not a drop, it just works.

Go ahead and grab the package here:-
http://github.com/downloads/ndejong/twitteroauth-helper/twitteroauth-hel...

Source at GitHub:-
http://github.com/ndejong/twitteroauth-helper