Calling Twitter REST api from JavaScript with OAUTH

I’ve started on a project where I need to call Twitter’s REST apis from a Node.js JavaScript app. I’ve built a Java app before that integrated with Twitter, but used a library to help with the OAUTH authentication. Looking around for a JavaScript library, it looks like node-oauth does what I need to do, so gave it a go.

Twitter’s API docs are pretty good, but I ran into an issue with node-oauth with an error coming back from:

POST /statuses/update.json

which returned this message:

{ statusCode: 401,
 data: '{"errors":[{"code":32,"message":"Could not authenticate you."}]}' }

which is odd because using the node-oauth library to authenticate and then call any of the GET apis with node-oauth was working fine. If you Google this error there’s numerous posts about this error for all number of reasons, so I’m not sure it’s a particularly specific message.

Here’s a working example for a GET:

First, use node-oauth to authenticate with your Twitter key, secret, and app access token and secret (which you can set up here):

var oauth = new OAuth.OAuth(
    'https://api.twitter.com/oauth/request_token',
    'https://api.twitter.com/oauth/access_token',
    config.twitterConsumerKey,
    config.twitterSecretKey,
    '1.0A',
    null,
    'HMAC-SHA1'
);

Next, using the returned value from this call, make the GET request (it builds the request including the OAUTH headers for you):

//GET /search/tweets.json
oauth.get(
    'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json?q=%40twitterapi',
    config.accessToken,
    config.accessTokenSecret,
    function (e, data, res){
        if (e) console.error(e);
        console.log(data);
    });

Attempting a POST to update the status for this account using the similar api:

var status = "{'status':'test 3 from nodejs'}";

oauth.post('https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/update.json',
    config.accessToken,
    config.accessTokenSecret,
    status,
    function(error, data) {
        console.log('\nPOST status:\n');
        console.log(error || data);
});

And this is the call that returned the error about “could not authenticate”.

Looking through a few other tickets for the node-oauth project, this one gave a clue – this particular issue was about special chars in the body content to the POST, but it gave an example of the body formed like this:

var status = ({'status':'test from nodejs'});

I would have thought passing a String would have worked, but I guess the api is expecting an object? Anyway, this is working, and looks good so far.