Interfacing a Rails App to Fire Eagle Pt 1: Exploration via IRB

Kamal Fariz Mahyuddin on Ruby, Rails, Git, Chef and other web development geekery.

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Mar
11th

Tue

Interfacing a Rails App to Fire Eagle Pt 1: Exploration via IRB

Here are my notes as I explore interfacing a Rails app to Fire Eagle. Tokens have been masked to protect the innocent :)

Create a new application.

Get the fireeagle gem.

MacBook-Pro:src kamal$ git clone git://github.com/kamal/fireeagle.git fireeagle
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/kamal/src/fireeagle/.git/
remote: Generating pack...
remote: Done counting 377 objects.
remote: Deltifying 377 objects...
remote:  100% (377/377) done
remote: Total 377 (delta 192), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (377/377), 75.91 KiB | 9 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (192/192), done.
MacBook-Pro:src kamal$ cd fireeagle
MacBook-Pro:fireeagle(master) kamal$ rake install_gem
(in /Users/kamal/src/fireeagle)
sudo gem install --local pkg/*.gem
Successfully installed fireeagle-0.6.1
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for fireeagle-0.6.1...
Installing RDoc documentation for fireeagle-0.6.1...

Fire up irb and instantiate a client with the Consumer Key and Secret provided by Step 1.

MacBook-Pro:~ kamal$ irb
>> require 'fireeagle'
=> true
>> client = FireEagle::Client.new(
  :consumer_key    => 'AAAAAAAAAAAA',
  :consumer_secret => 'BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB')
=> #<FireEagle::Client:0x1bef504 ...>

Generate a Request Token and associate it with the user because we’ll need to locate who authenticated our app.

>> client.get_request_token
=> #<OAuth::Token:0x1bddb24 @secret="emfPurZAbYlRqNL7fSxhXOkxCJRZ2T1r", @token="mGxmGcGPNyjr">
>> current_user.update_attributes!(
  :request_token        => client.request_token.token,
  :request_token_secret => client.request_token.secret)

Redirect the user to the Authorization URL.

>> client.authorization_url
=> "https://fireeagle.yahoo.net/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=mGxmGcGPNyjr"

After the user grants us permission, Fire Eagle will redirect the user’s browser to our Callback URL (defined in Step 1) with the same oauth_token params.
```
http://yourapp.example.com/your_call_back_path?oauth_token=mGxmGcGPNyjr
```

Find the User by the oauth_token and instantiate a new client (client2 in our IRB session) with the request token and secret.

>> user = User.find_by_request_token(params[:oauth_token])
>> client2 = FireEagle::Client.new(
  :consumer_key         => 'AAAAAAAAAAAA',
  :consumer_secret      => 'BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB',
  :request_token        => user.request_token,
  :request_token_secret => user.request_token_secret)

Convert the Request Token to a long-lived Access Token and save it. Optionally, you can nil out the Request Token because you are not going to need them anymore.

>> client2.convert_to_access_token
=> #<OAuth::Token:0x23c4824 @token="CCCCCCCCCCCC", @secret="DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD">
>> user.update_attributes!(
  :access_token         => client2.access_token.token,
  :access_token_secret  => client2.access_token.secret
  :request_token        => nil
  :request_token_secret => nil)

Go to town! From here on out, you can directly instantiate a client using the user’s Access Token to read or update their location.

>> client3 = FireEagle::Client.new(
  :consumer_key        => 'AAAAAAAAAAAA',
  :consumer_secret     => 'BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB',
  :access_token        => user.access_token,
  :access_token_secret => user.access_token_secret)
>> client3.update(:q => 'petaling jaya')
=> #<FireEagle::Response:0x2549a8c ...>
>> client.user.best_guess.name
=> "Petaling Jaya, Malaysia"

A lot of the stuff above can be extracted into a Rails plugin. First dibs on acts_as_hatchling!

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Interfacing a Rails App to Fire Eagle Pt 1: Exploration via IRB