PHP OAuth extension: trial, error and success

I’ve been experimenting with the PHP OAuth PECL extension over the last few days and initially ran into some small problems getting it to function correctly. So for the sake of making this world wide web an even better place, here are some error-messages you might encounter and what you could do to resolve them:

  • “OAuth::getRequestToken() URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration” → the OAuth extension by default uses fopen (streams) to fetch data from the OAuth provider (server), but you’re probably slightly paranoid (or is it security- conscious?) and have allow_url_fopen = 0 in you php.ini. Just change that value to “1” and reload your webserver and then see …
  • SSL: fatal protocol error → OAuth seems to be working fine, but for reasons unknown OAuth insists something fatal just happened. You could ignore this one, or try to lower the error-reporting value or do as I did and decide to use OAuth::setRequestEngine to switch from those doomed streams to almighty Curl, until …
  • “setRequestEngine expects parameter to be long, string given” → so you installed (compiled) the OAuth-extension, but you didn’t have that libcurl-dev package installed, did you? No matter how polite you request that Curl-engine, it is just not going to happen unless you install libcurl-dev, and then re-installed OAuth.

And after successfully re-installing OAuth, this time with Curl-support, you could try to build a small application, accessing GMail maybe?