GitHub Readme.md
This repository provides an example of how to use Flask-Dance to connect
to LinkedIn as an OAuth client. The example code is in linkedin.py
--
all the other files in this repository are secondary. You can run this example
code locally, or deploy it to Heroku for free to see how it runs in a
production-style environment.
Heroku is a great way to get up and running fast, and you don't even need to open the terminal!
It's easy, and it's free! Just click on this button:
You can leave all the fields at their default values: we'll fill them in later. The only thing that matters right now is the app name, and Heroku will autogenerate a name for you if you leave that field blank. Using an autogenerated name is perfectly fine, just take note of what it is.
Note that your app isn't functional yet, and if you try to visit it right now, you'll end up at a LinkedIn 404 page. That's OK, we're not done yet!
TBD
Go to Heroku and visit the settings page for your app. (You can get there from your Heroku dashboard, or by clicking on the "Manage App" button after the deploy step is finished.) On that page, there should be a section called "Config Variables" where you can manage the config vars for your application. You'll need click the "Reveal Config Vars" button to see which variables are available, and then the "Edit" button to allow you to change these variables.
Take the client ID you got from LinkedIn, and paste it into the "VALUE" field
next to the LINKEDIN_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID
field, replacing the dummy value that
was there before. Similarly, take the client secret you got from LinkedIn,
and paste it into the "VALUE" field next to the
LINKEDIN_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET
field,
replacing the dummy value that was there before.
Click the "Save" button when you're done.
Your app name from Heroku will determine the URL that your app is running on:
the URL will be https://APPNAME.herokuapp.com
. For example, if Heroku
assigned you an app name of peaceful-lake
, your app will be available at
https://peaceful-lake.herokuapp.com
. Visit that URL, and you should
immediately be redirected to login with LinkedIn!
If you'd prefer to run this locally on your computer, you can do that as well.
TBD
Run the following commands on your computer:
git clone https://github.com/singingwolfboy/flask-dance-linkedin.git cd flask-dance-github python3 -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate pip install -r requirements.txt
These commands will clone this git repository onto your computer,
create a virtual environment for this project, activate it, and install
the dependencies listed in requirements.txt
.
Many applications use environment variables for configuration, and Flask-Dance is no exception. You'll need to set the following environment variables:
FLASK_APP
: set this to linkedin.py
LINKEDIN_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID
: set this to the client ID you got
from LinkedIn.LINKEDIN_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET
: set this to the client secret you got
from LinkedIn.OAUTHLIB_INSECURE_TRANSPORT
: set this to true
. This indicates that
you're doing local testing, and it's OK to use HTTP instead of HTTPS for
OAuth. You should only do this for local testing.
Do not set this in production! [oauthlib docs]The easiest way to set these environment variables is to define them in
an .env
file. You can then install the python-dotenv package
to make Flask automatically read this file when you run the dev server.
This repository has a .env.example
file that you can copy to
.env
to get a head start.
Run your app using the flask
command:
flask run
Then, go to http://localhost:5000/ to visit your app and log in with GitHub!
If you get an error message that says "Could not locate a Flask application",
then you need to install the python-dotenv package using pip
:
pip install python-dotenv
Once the package is installed, try the flask run
command again!
Fork this GitHub repo so that you can make changes to it. Read the documentation for Flask and Flask-Dance to learn what's possible. Ask questions, learn as you go, build your own OAuth-enabled web application, and don't forget to be awesome!