Twitter support

Web authentication flow

This describes the web authentication flow with Twitter. You could also login with an existing access token from Twitter through the API. This web flow sets a cookie, the API returns a JWT instead.

First of all you need to have your API credentials ready by creating an app on Twitter. Then add them to your para-application.conf configuration file:

para-application.conf

para.tw_app_id = "..."
para.tw_secret = "..."

Or add these through the app settings API:

{
  "tw_app_id": "..."
  "tw_secret": "..."
  "signin_success": "http://success.url"
  "signin_failure": "http://failure.url"
}

Para can return a short-lived ID token back to the client which initiated the request. Add jwt=id to your signin_success url. For example { "signin_success": "http://success.url?jwt=id" }. The id value of the parameter will be replaced with the actual JWT ID token, which you can use to call paraClient.signIn("passwordless", idToken) to get the long-lived session token.

Support for logging in with Twitter is implemented by the TwitterAuthFilter. This filter responds to requests at /twitter_auth.

The endpoint expects an appid value from the ‘state’ parameter, e.g. ?state={appid}. If that parameter is missing, the default (root) app will be used as authentication target.

To initiate a login with Twitter just redirect the user to the /twitter_auth. This will redirect the user to Twitter for authentication. For apps other than the root app, redirect to /twitter_auth?state=myapp.

Register an application

You need to register a new application with Twitter in order to obtain an access and secret keys. The Twitter API does not share users’ emails by default, you have to ask Twitter to whitelist your app first.

Below is an example Javascript code for a Twitter login button:

$("#twitterLoginBtn").click(function() {
    window.location = "/twitter_auth";
    // for apps other than the root app use:
    // window.location = "/twitter_auth?state=" + APPID;
    return false;
});