prawoauth2 0.1.1

Library to make your life easier using OAuth2 for PRAW

prawoauth2 is a helper library which makes writing Reddit bots/apps using OAuth2 super easy and simple.

Installation

pip install prawoauth2

How, What and Why?

prawoauth2 comes with two components, PrawOAuth2Mini and PrawOAuth2Server. PrawOAuth2Server authorizes your app/script with the Reddit account and gives you access token. PrawOAuth2Mini uses these tokens for all next transactions with Reddit. Remember, for a bot, you only need access_token.

Why it is written like that? If you are writing a bot and running it on a headless server, something like Amazon AWS or Openshift, you cannot authorize your script with the Reddit account, as it tries to open the browser for authorization. This is one time only operation(if you pass the parameter permanent). So, I decided to break this into two parts. Run the PrawOAuth2Server locally on your computer, get the access_token, refresh_token and save them somewhere. Later, PrawOAuth2Mini can make use of these tokens for further transactions. And it does not require browser at all, so that it can run in a headless server without any hiccups.

TLDR; PrawOAuth2Server meant to be run only once locally on your main machine to fetch the first access_token, refresh_token and PrawOAuth2Mini later and for everything.

Usage

Running PrawOAuth2Server

For first time, as I mentioned earlier, you need fetch the access_token. So it is enough if you do the following only once. An instance of PrawOAuth2Server will run a server the moment you start it and it will be ready to handle requests from Reddit’s OAuth Server. It basically captures the OAuth code from the redirect url, coming from Reddit.

0. First you need to register you bot/app on Reddit. The praw documentation already has a nice overview about how. Go here and here’s what I recommend for a bot:

   

   registering

   Just make sure you are setting redirect uri to http://127.0.0.1:65010/authorize_callback. Rest doesn’t matter. Once you have created the app, you will get app_key and app_secret. Copy them somewhere. These are credentials of your app, so make sure you keep them super secret and never ever commit them in git.

   

   tokens

1. Import the required modules:

   import praw
   from prawoauth2 import PrawOAuth2Server

2. Create a praw instance

   user_agent = 'some string that uniquely identifies my bot'
   reddit_client = praw.Reddit(user_agent=user_agent)

3. Pass the app_key and app_secret of your app to the PrawOAuth2Server which will give you an instance to play with.

   oauthserver = PrawOAuth2Server(reddit_client, app_key, app_secret,
                                   state=user_agent)

4. Now, you need to start the oauth server, which runs internally.

   oauthserver.start()

   The moment you start it, it opens the default web browser. If you are not logged in, log in with your bot account credentials and authorize the script (i.e. clicking on accept). This basically says, ‘Hey Reddit, give access of my reddit account(your bot account) to this app(your script)’. This will be redirected back and will show you a successful message.

5. Once it is successful, you can get the tokens by calling get_access_codes.

   tokens = oauthserver.get_access_codes()

   The tokens is a dict type:

   >>> tokens
   {u'access_token': u'2...U', u'scope': set([u'identity']), u'refresh_token': u'2...s'}

Using PrawOAuth2Mini

PrawOAuth2Mini will be used in your script always (unlike PrawOAuth2Server). It basically does two operations. First, it sets the praw instance with all the required credentials required for OAuth operation. The access_token expires for every 60 minutes (this is set by Reddit), so you can call refresh to get the new tokens. You don’t really need to keep track of expiry time, when the tokens are expired, OAuthInvalidToken exception will be thrown. Catch it and do refresh. On the other hand, you can call the refresh before every operation, however it will get new tokens only when old ones are about to expire.

1. Just create an instance of PrawOAuth2Mini with all the required parameters.

   oauth_helper = PrawOAuth2Mini(reddit_client, app_key=app_key,
                         app_secret=app_secret,
                         access_token=access_token,
                         refresh_token=refresh_token, scopes=scopes)
   
   Note that `refresh_token` is not required here. Even if you just pass the `access_token`, it will work.

2. Call refresh before every operation or in catch block of OAuthInvalidToken exception

   oauth_helper.refresh()

Check the examples directory for examples.

Bots using prawoauth2

• Goodreads Bot

Feel free to fork and add link to your bot/project.

LICENSE

The mighty MIT License. Please check LICENSE for info.

Credits

SmBe19’s praw-OAuth2Util and KissTheBlade_’s script were very helpful. These Reddit threads also helped me lot.

First I started using praw-OAuth2Util, but I really did not like the way it was handling configurations and tokens. So, I forked and started using my fork. And later ended up writing my own. I am no longer maintaining the fork and I recommend using this library instead.