Using Zend_Service_Twitter and Zend_OAuth

ZF Version: 1.10.8

The source code of this post is available at GitHub.

At this short tutorial i will show to how use Zend_Service_Twitter and Zend_OAuth. I’m considering that:

1. You have a working ZF environment.
2. You have registered your application at Twitter.com and have the consumer key and secret.

I won’t get into the details of how OAuth work, since there are many tutorials about it. But to summarize what our controller will do:

1. User access authenticate action and it’s redirected to Twitter.com
2. If user allow application access, he gets back to our application on callback action.
3. Callback action process the request and if user is authenticated, redirect to index action.
4. Index action uses twitter service class to get user timeline ( or do other actions ).

The first thing is to define a few configuration parameters. Since they are common between your controller actions, we will place it at application.ini. So open file applications/configs/application.ini and add the following lines:

twitter.callbackUrl = "http://localhost/twitter/callback"
twitter.siteUrl = "http://twitter.com/oauth"
twitter.consumerKey = "yourConsumerKey"
twitter.consumerSecret = "yourConsumerSecret"

The directives are self explanatory, just make sure that the callback url is set to the correct action.

Now that you have the config, let’s create a controller for it. In this example, it will be called twitter:

<?php

class TwitterController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
	public function init()
	{

	}

	public function indexAction()
	{

	}

	public function authenticateAction()
	{

	}

	public function callbackAction()
	{

	}
}

Since we will need the config variables on all actions, we define it at init method:

	public function init()
	{
		// Define zend config on registry. I'm doing it here, but you probably have this on your bootstrap
		$zendConfig = new Zend_Config_Ini( APPLICATION_PATH . '/configs/application.ini', APPLICATION_ENV );
		Zend_Registry::set( 'Zend_Config' , $zendConfig );
	}

We have to redirect user to Twitter.com, so that he can allow our application to access his account. This is done at authenticate action:

	public function authenticateAction()
	{
		$zendConfig = Zend_Registry::get( 'Zend_Config' );

		// Instance oauth consumer with config options
		$consumer = new Zend_Oauth_Consumer($zendConfig->twitter->toArray());

		// Using the default session namespace, we store the request token serialized
		$session = new Zend_Session_Namespace();
		$session->requestToken = serialize( $consumer->getRequestToken() );

		// Redirect user to twitter.com
		$consumer->redirect();
	}

If user clicks on allow, he will be redirected to the callback action with a series of GET parameters containing the auth info. We have to process it in order to get the access token.

	public function callbackAction()
	{
		$zendConfig = Zend_Registry::get( 'Zend_Config' );

		// Instance oauth consumer with config options
		$consumer = new Zend_Oauth_Consumer($zendConfig->twitter->toArray());

		// Use default session namespace
		$session = new Zend_Session_Namespace();

		// Check if we got a get request and that  user already have a request token
		if ( !empty( $this->_request->getQuery() ) && !empty( $session->requestToken ) ) {

			// Get access token
			$token = $consumer->getAccessToken( $this->_request->getQuery() , unserialize( $session->requestToken ) );

			// Store access token on a session variable. You can also store on DB, in case you want to use later
			$session->accessToken = serialize( $token );

			// Remove request token, not necessary anymore
			unset( $session->requestToken );

			// Redirect to index action
			return $this->_helper->redirector( 'index' );
		} else {
			throw new Exception( 'Invalid access. No token provided.' );
		}
	}

As you can see, if everything works user is redirected to index action. At index action, i’ve placed an example of how to get user recent tweets. Zend_Service_Twitter offers many functions, you can check them at ZF manual.

	public function indexAction()
	{
		// Default namespace
		$session = new Zend_Session_Namespace();

		try {
			// Check if user have access token.
			if ( empty( $session->accessToken ) ) {
				throw new Exception( 'You are not logged in. Please, try again.' );
			}

			// Unserialize access token
			$token = unserialize($session->accessToken);

			$zendConfig = Zend_Registry::get( 'Zend_Config' );

			// Prepare a config array with access token and config options
			$config = $zendConfig->twitter->toArray();
			$config['username'] = $token->getParam( 'screen_name' );
			$config['accessToken'] = $token;

			$twitter = new Zend_Service_Twitter( $config );

			// Verify if credentials work
			$response = $twitter->account->verifyCredentials();

			if ( !$response || !empty( $response->error ) ) {
				throw new Exception( 'Wrong credentials. Please, try to login again.' );
			}

			// Vardump user timeline ( one tweet )
			var_dump( $twitter->status->userTimeLine() );

		} catch ( Exception $e ) {

			echo $e->getMessage();
		}

		die();
	}

That’s it. Hope you found this tutorial userful.

If you want, you can download the full source-code: TwitterController.php.