I’m using it for some work I’m doing with a client of mine (Practically Green – a great little eco-startup) and ran into an issue with how it created callback url’s — the url where the user is redirected after the Oauth authentication is completed.

The issue was with the way our web listeners are proxied back to the rails application servers. Behind the scenes, the rails application servers have a host name of something that’s not really a valid domain name (say, something like ‘railsserver’).

Omniauth was grabbing this value from the request object and forwarding our users back to an Oauth callback url like ‘http://railsservers/auth/twitter/…’. Obviously, this isn’t what we wanted — the Oauth callbacks were failing.

After digging through the Omniauth code, I ran across the offending piece of code:


 def full_host
  case OmniAuth.config.full_host
   when String
    OmniAuth.config.full_host
   when Proc
    OmniAuth.config.full_host.call(env)
   else
    uri = URI.parse(request.url.gsub(/\?.*$/,''))
    uri.path = ''
    uri.query = nil
    uri.to_s
   end
  end


Basically, if this config paramerter :full_host isn’t set to either a string or a proc, omniauth pulls the uri from the request object — this is where it was messing up.

Since the Omniauth config object is a singleton, I just set that parameter in config/initializers/omniauth.rb like so:

(in config/initializers/omniauth.rb)
# Set the default hostname for omniauth to send callbacks to.
OmniAuth.config.full_host = "http://practicallygreen.com"


With this, the full_host param is a string and now the redirects are always created to come back to where we want.

I created the redswingline stapler twitter bot almost two years ago as a way of experimenting with Twitter and its API. I had been watching the movie Office Space a lot and thought it would be fun to create a twitter avatar of the red swingline stapler that was on Milton’s desk.

Anyway, it was off-line for about a year but I recently started it up again.

I hate to admit, but that stapler has more twitter followers than I do…