Overview

twitterproxy is a Scala web application that acts as an authenticated server-side proxy to the Twitter REST API.

Once configured with a key and secret to a registered twitter app, twitterproxy uses OAuth to sign in users with their twitter account. Once signed in, it can proxy requests to the twitter API on behalf of the signed in user.

A test instance is deployed on heroku:

http://twitterproxyapp.herokuapp.com/

Note that this is a free instance which means that the first request could trigger deployment and the page may take a few seconds to load.

Signing in results in an access token and secret for the user. This is encoded and set in a cookie which is then used when invoking the twitter API. This cookie is set on the root domain which means any app on that domain can use the proxy.

Note that if you use the project as-is, the cookie will not be encrypted. Encoding the token and secret in plaintext is not recommended. Developers are encouraged to provide a strong implementation of the twitterproxy.Crypto interface to support encryption / decryption. Alternatively, the token and secret can be persisted on the server.

Once the user has signed in and the cookie has been set, all GET and POST requests to the /proxy/* URL will sent to https://api.twitter.com/* and the result will be returned as-is. For example, a request to /proxy/1.1/search/tweets.json?q=test will be sent to https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json?q=test and the resulting JSON response will be returned to the caller.

Configuration

Configuration properties need to be specified in src/main/resources/application.properties:

# twitter application key
twitterproxy.app-key=
# twitter application secret
twitterproxy.app-secret=
# twitter calls back this URL after authentication (http://<domain>[/<context>]/callback)
# e.g. http://www.example.com/twitterproxy/callback
twitterproxy.callback-url=

Running

Once configured (set twitterproxy.callback-url=http://localhost:8080/callback), the app can be built and run using sbt. :

~ > sbt
sbt> container:start

Go to http://localhost:8080/. You will be redirected to http://localhost:8080/test where you can test signing in and executing a couple of calls to the twitter api.

Debugging

To easily run and debug the app in Eclipse and other IDEs you can run runner.RunWebApp. This starts an embedded Jetty server and mounts this webapp. Go to http://localhost:8080/

Deployment

To package and deploy the generated war:

sbt package

Notes

• Uses the Scalatra web framework.
• Uses oauth-signpost for signing OAuth requests.
• Uses dispatch for async http calls to the twitter api