Authenticating with OAuth from PHP

I've been looking into OAuth recently and really like what I see, so I started looking at actually starting to play with something that uses it (and isn't twitter). In the pursuit of this, I spent some time walking through the process of how to actually authenticate using OAuth, as a client. I chose Yahoo!'s service, because they have some fabulous developer documentation and have a standard OAuth implementation. Although you don't strictly need any special libraries to handle OAuth, that would be a bit like decoding XML with a regex, so I used the OAuth Package from PECL. For others (including me after I've slept), here's an outline of the process.

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Missing pcre.h when installing pecl_oauth

I was playing with pecl_oauth last week (more about that in a later post) and when I tried to install from PECL, it grabbed the files, ran the configure step but stopped with an error status during make. This is bad news for those of us who are ubuntu users rather than compile-happy linux users! Closer inspection showed this line around the point things started to go wrong:

Error: /usr/include/php5/ext/pcre/php_pcre.h:29:18: error: pcre.h: No such file or directory

I didn't have the header files for pcre installed - in ubuntu the headers are in the -dev packages so I just installed what I needed:

sudo aptitude install libpcre3-dev

Re-attempting the pecl install, everything worked as expected. This is on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, and from reading around you'd want to install the same package in response to this error message, regardless of what you were doing to cause it. Hope this helps someone.