twitter-connect-plugin

Cordova/PhoneGap plugin to use Twitter Single Sign On

Using Twitter's Fabric SDK, you can enable SSO with your Android and iOS apps. It's a fairly involved process, so I'll try to lay out every step necessary.

Install

Get a Fabric API key

To use Fabric, you'll need to sign up. Apparently they have to authorize people manually, so it might be a while until your account is created, mine took about an hour.

The only thing we really need is the API key. Getting the API key is fairly tricky, but this process seems to work:

1. Login to Fabric account and open https://fabric.io/kits/android/crashlytics/install
2. Find the meta-data code block in AndroidManifest.xml
3. Find your API Key pre filled in the code.

Create a Twitter app

Create a Twitter application and get the consumer key and consumer secret.

Add plugin to your Cordova app

cordova plugin add twitter-connect-plugin --variable FABRIC_KEY=<Fabric API Key>

Make sure you put in your valid Fabric API Key in place of <Fabric API Key>.

Alternatively, you can install the plugin using the GIT url: cordova plugin add https://github.com/ManifestWebDesign/twitter-connect-plugin --variable FABRIC_KEY=<Fabric API Key>

Add configuration to config.xml

Open config.xml (in your project's root) and add these two lines before the closing </widget> tag:

<preference name="TwitterConsumerKey" value="<Twitter Consumer Key>" />
<preference name="TwitterConsumerSecret" value="<Twitter Consumer Secret>" />

Of course, replace the values with the keys you got from the above steps.

For iOS, the deployment target needs to be at least 7.0. You can set this in the config.xml file like so:

<preference name="deployment-target" value="7.0" />

Dependencies

Dependencies have been added in the Android version for the core SDK (com.twitter.sdk.android.core) and for retrofit retrofit.* to simplify the REST URLs (See Square Retrofit)

Finished!

You should now be able to: cordova run android or cordova run ios

Phonegap Build

Add the following to your config:

<gap:plugin name="twitter-connect-plugin" source="npm" spec="0.5.0">
	<param name="FABRIC_KEY" value="<Fabric API Key>" />
</gap:plugin>

You'll need to specify iOS7 for TwitterKit

<preference name="deployment-target" value="7.0" />

Usage

This plugin adds an object to the window named TwitterConnect. Right now, you can only login and logout and get a user's profile information. The showUser method shows how to call any of the Twitter REST API methods using the TwitterAPIClient.

Login

Login using the .login method:

TwitterConnect.login(
  function(result) {
    console.log('Successful login!');
    console.log(result);
  }, function(error) {
    console.log('Error logging in');
    console.log(error);
  }
);

The login reponse object is defined as:

{
  userName: '<Twitter User Name>',
  userId: '<Twitter User Id>',
  secret: '<Twitter Oauth Secret>',
  token: '<Twitter Oauth Token>'
}

Logout

Logout using the .logout method:

TwitterConnect.logout(
  function() {
	console.log('Successful logout!');
  },
  function() {
    console.log('Error logging out');
  }
);

ShowUser

Show a user's profile information using the a GET to the /1.1/users/show.json REST API call:

TwitterConnect.showUser(
  function(result) {
    console.log('User Profile:');
    console.log(result);
    console.log('Twitter handle :'+result.userName);
  }, function(error) {
    console.log('Error retrieving user profile');
    console.log(error);
  }
);

The user/show.json API returns a JSON response object containing all the published information as per the Twitter API specifications.

See Twitter GET users/show Developer Documentation