eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Authenticate Users

Use Authentication & Authorization to allow your users to pass eBay login information to your applications.

Whether you’re playing around with the eBay API for your own amusement or building an enterprise application for thousands of users, you’ll have to implement a schema eBay calls “Auth & Auth” to pass login information to eBay along with your calls.

If you only need to access the API for your own eBay account (so you can, for instance, do simple searches [Hack #104] or create listings [Hack #113] ), this process is simple.

Open the Authentication Token Tool at developer.ebay.com/tokentool, show in Figure 8-1. Select the environment you’re using, either Production or Sandbox [Hack #102] , and then paste the security keys you got when you signed up (described at the beginning of this chapter).

Click “Continue to generate token” when you’re done. On the next page, you’ll be asked to sign into eBay. Fill in your eBay User ID and password and submit the form. After clicking “Agree and Continue,” you’ll be presented with your Auth token, along with lots of other information. Copy the token (Ctrl-C) and paste it (Ctrl-V) into the config.pl script shown at the beginning of this chapter (or into any application you’re writing that uses the eBay API).

Figure 8-1. Use the Authentication Token Tool to generate the security keys you’ll need to access the API under your own ...