cnuonline/othw

OAuth 2 the Hard Way - calling the Dropbox API in lots of languages without any Dropbox or OAuth libraries

Dropbox and OAuth 2 the Hard Way

This project shows, in a variety of languages, how to authenticate a user and call the Dropbox API without using existing OAuth or Dropbox libraries.

Code is provided for the following languages:

• C# - ASP.NET MVC 4, HttpClient
• Go - (no libraries)
• Java - Spark, HttpClient
• JavaScript (browser) - Superagent
• JavaScript (Node.js) - Express, Request
• PHP - Slim, Requests
• Perl - Dancer, HTTP::Tiny
• Python - Flask, Requests
• Ruby - Sinatra, Rest-Client

To run the samples, you'll need to create a Dropbox API app and put your app key and secret into the code. You'll also need to set up the right OAuth 2 callback URL (http://127.0.0.1:5000/callback for most samples, http://localhost:5000/callback for C# and http://127.0.0.1:5000 for JavaScript).

FAQ

Why?

There are lots of libraries for using the Dropbox Core API, but some languages don't have a library, and libraries don't always cover every option of every API method. Fortunately, the API is pretty simple, and OAuth 2 (which is used for authentication) is also pretty simple. By reading through these examples, a developer familiar with basic HTTP APIs should be able to write their own code for interacting with the Dropbox API without having to rely on an existing library.

It's also kind of fun and instructive to read and write the same app in multiple programming languages.

Your code sucks.

Good question! I'm not an expert in most of these languages—for example, this was my first time writing Go—so it's quite likely that I got some code wrong or failed to follow some language idioms. Please send me a pull request if you have suggestions for how to improve the code.

What about language X?

Let me know (@smarx, [email protected]) if there's another language you'd like to see a sample for. Better yet, write it yourself and send me a pull request!