Different Access token every time - using Google OAuth and Authlogic

Question

Greetings!

I have some troubles enabling OAuth authentication for my web application running on Ruby on Rails. I am using authlogic and authlogic_oauth and that is, in the end, using OAuth gem and therefore I decided to ask here. So shortly:

I succesfully "register" (i.e. obtain the first Access Token for the user) but then, whenever I try to "login", I receive a differenct access token for the same Google Account, the Authlogic-oauth plugin fails to find the user and the login crashes. Maybe I don't understand it right but is not the AT supposed to be the same every time. And can it be a problem that I am accessing Google from http://localhost even though the Customer keys are for different domain?

anyway, thanks for any reply ... I spend already 2 days with that issue and debugging doesn't seems to lead me anywhere

Jakub

PS: I sent that question on Google Group oauth-ruby - sorry to anyone reading both channels

Answer 1

The AT is supposed to be different every time. OAuth is not an authentication protocol, it is an authorization delegation protocol. Try using OpenID instead: http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/OpenID.html

Answer 2

Twitter does not give out different tokens which allows OAuth to be used as an authentication mechanism. LinkedIn doesn't do that meaning you may only use OAuth as an authorization protocol (which is what it was intended to do).

However, there is a useful API for pulling in data from LinkedIn. Of particular interest could be the Profile API.