user.friends OAuth

[Jon]

Hi, I'm having some trouble using OAuth with user.friends

https://www.goodreads.com/friend/user... (returns 404)
https://www.goodreads.com/friend/user... (returns 401 not authorized despite seemingly being authenticated)

I'm able to use call other methods requiring OAuth however, such as shelves.add_to_shelf and user.compare.

I'm using rauth via python as in the example docs https://www.goodreads.com/api/oauth_e...

And help would be appreciated!

[Ettore]

I suspect there's a bug in how the routing for this api works. Can you try using this format:

https://www.goodreads.com/friend/user...

Another thing to verify is to verify you're not using/storing cookies on your client.

Also some users have private profiles, so make sure to query a user whose profile is public.

[Ettore]

Also, using PostMan could help debugging oauth problems:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/de...

[Jon]

Hi, both https://www.goodreads.com/friend/user... and https://www.goodreads.com/friend/user... now work when using Postman. However, I'm still having trouble calling user.friends with rauth + python.

session = OAuth1Session(...)

Working [200]:
session.get('https://www.goodreads.com/api/auth_user')
session.get('https://www.goodreads.com/user/compar...')

Not working [401]:
session.get('https://www.goodreads.com/friend/user...')
session.get('https://www.goodreads.com/friend/user...')

[Ettore]

If they do work in Postman and not in python, it's likely something related to the python set up, although I'm not sure what should be done there since I'm not a python developer…

One thing I know is problematic is how parameter names with square brackets are handled, although it doesn't look like you have those in your case.

A 401 error means that the oauth signature was not verified: this could be for example that not all parameters are signed, or the timestamp is too old (timezone issues), or the nonce is missing...

[Jon]

Hmm, I've been using rauth as in the documentation example but still can't get it to work. Would some other OAuth python library be better? (I've tried Flask-OAuth, but ran into issues there too)

It's weird how some API calls work but others don't. Does user.friends operate a different way? If someone could help me out, I'd really appreciate it!

EDIT: Flask-OAuth worked.

[Gabe]

I also had similarly strange issues with rauth - many API calls wouldn't work unless I ran an auth.user lookup first.

I switched to requests-oauthlib (https://github.com/requests/requests-...) and that library worked great (one caveat: when trading a request token for access token, just be sure to use a dummy 'verifier' variable since Goodreads doesn't return one.)