Mining the Social Web, 3rd Edition

Appendix B. OAuth Primer

Just as each chapter in this book has a corresponding Jupyter Notebook, each appendix also has a corresponding Jupyter Notebook. All notebooks, regardless of purpose, are maintained in the book’s GitHub source code repository. The particular appendix that you are reading here “in print” serves as a special cross-reference to the Jupyter Notebook that provides example code demonstrating interactive OAuth flows that involve explicit user authorization, which is needed if you implement a user-facing application.

The remainder of this appendix provides a terse discussion of OAuth as a basic orientation. The sample code for OAuth flows for popular websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn is in the corresponding Jupyter Notebook that is available with this book’s source code.

Note

Like the other appendixes, this appendix has a corresponding Jupyter Notebook entitled Appendix B: OAuth Primer that you can view online.

Overview

OAuth stands for “Open Authorization” and provides a means for users to authorize an application to access their account data through an API without the users needing to hand over sensitive credentials such as a username and password combination. Although OAuth is presented here in the context of the social web, keep in mind that it’s a specification that has wide applicability in any context in which users would like to authorize an application to take certain actions on their behalf. In general, users can control the level of ...