A CodeIgniter-compatible wrapper for Twitter OAuth

As part of a new iA project, we needed a clean way of authorising a user via Twitter’s new OAuth system. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I hunted for a good library and found TwitterOAuth, by Abraham Williams. Unfortunately the library was structured in a way that made it difficult to use with the CodeIgniter framework, and left a lot to the developer when trying to initially authenticate a user. In working with the code I developed a simple wrapper library that solves these issues and makes Twitter even more easy to work with from CodeIgniter 2.0.

The only major non-structural change is a new authentication method that deals with the fetching and management of the oauth token and oauth token secret variables between redirects. Implementing it is as simple as including the following code within a controller method. When the method is accessed, it will redirect to Twitter to authenticate and return to the controller when successful.

public function sign_in() {
  $this->load->library('twitter', array(
    'consumer_key' => OAUTH_CONSUMER_KEY,
    'consumer_secret' => OAUTH_CONSUMER_SECRET
  ));
  
  if (is_object($req = $this->twitter->authenticate())) {
    // Do something with the $req you received ...
  }
}

The library requires both the TwitterOAuth and OAuth libraries, both available to download from Abraham’s GitHub account. Installation is the same as with any other library, but you need to enable the $_GET array to receive data from Twitter when authenticating. You can download it from my Github account.