Book Image

Mastering OAuth 2.0

Book Image

Mastering OAuth 2.0

Overview of this book

OAuth 2.0 is a powerful authentication and authorization framework that has been adopted as a standard in the technical community. Proper use of this protocol will enable your application to interact with the world's most popular service providers, allowing you to leverage their world-class technologies in your own application. Want to log your user in to your application with their Facebook account? Want to display an interactive Google Map in your application? How about posting an update to your user's LinkedIn feed? This is all achievable through the power of OAuth. With a focus on practicality and security, this book takes a detailed and hands-on approach to explaining the protocol, highlighting important pieces of information along the way. At the beginning, you will learn what OAuth is, how it works at a high level, and the steps involved in creating an application. After obtaining an overview of OAuth, you will move on to the second part of the book where you will learn the need for and importance of registering your application and types of supported workflows. You will discover more about the access token, how you can use it with your application, and how to refresh it after expiration. By the end of the book, you will know how to make your application architecture robust. You will explore the security considerations and effective methods to debug your applications using appropriate tools. You will also have a look at special considerations to integrate with OAuth service providers via native mobile applications. In addition, you will also come across support resources for OAuth and credentials grant.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering OAuth 2.0
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
11
Tooling and Troubleshooting
Index

Registering your application with Facebook


In order to register our client application with Facebook, we need to go to the Facebook Developers page. At the time of this writing, this is located at https://developers.facebook.com/.

From here, you can create your Facebook application and configure its settings.

Creating your application

Let's start by creating our application. The application creation page looks something like this:

Tip

Display name and namespace are not OAuth 2.0 properties. Rather, these are good examples of Facebook-specific application properties which they likely use for their own application management. Fill in whatever values you wish.

Once you've created your application, you'll be presented with a configuration screen that looks something like this:

Notice that at the top of the page near the application name, we are given an App ID and App Secret. This is our client ID and client secret, respectively.

Tip

In the real world

Different service providers will use different terminology...