Fork me on GitHub

Marcus Povey

Time, Space, and Plexiglas

Main menu

Skip to content
  • Home
  • Known Plugins
  • About
  • Hire Me!
  • Elgg Multisite
  • Known

Tag Archives: changes

Post navigation

Login via Facebook API just broke, here’s how to fix it…

Posted on March 30, 2017
by Marcus Povey

If you, like me, have been asked on more than one occasion to write a Facebook login integration for a site, you’re likely to have used the Facebook api library. You also, like me, have had a number of sites that are using older versions of this library which you’ve not had a chance to update – often these libraries are bundled with plugins – for Elgg, the now increasingly ancient “social_connect” plugin is common.

Social_connect, in particular, uses HybridAuth, which is no longer maintained, and itself bundles a rather old version of the Facebook API library.

Anyway, point is, you’ve got some legacy stuff out there. You’ve got the warnings from Facebook about version 2.2 of their API, scanned the changelog and run their migration tool. Today, you’ve suddenly got a bunch of emails from clients saying that the API logins no longer work.

When you take a look, you find that every attempt to log in either spits out an error about no valid User ID being returned or goes into an infinite redirect loop.

How to fix this

It took me a fair amount of digging to track this down, but what has happened is that the API has changed the response format of the request for an access token.

If this was mentioned in the changelog, I missed it. Newer versions of Facebook’s API will handle this, but if you’re using an older version (or rolled your own), you need to change the bit of your code that parses the access token out from the auth code request to handle JSON.

In the legacy Facebook API library, this is found in the method getAccessTokenFromCode() found in base_facebook.php, and you need to replace the following:

1
2
3
4
5
6
$response_params = array();
parse_str($access_token_response, $response_params);
if (!isset($response_params['access_token'])) {
  return false;
}
return $response_params['access_token'];

with…

1
2
3
4
$response_params = json_decode($access_token_response);
if (empty($response_params->access_token))
    return false;
return $response_params->access_token;

Hopefully this will result in a less high blood pressure day for you…

Share this:

  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • WhatsApp
  • Skype
Posted in Web | Tagged api, broken, changes, facebook, login | 5 Comments

Post navigation


Artisanal bit wrangler, Hacker, Wanderer. Have laptop, will travel.

Read more...

Follow me on: mapkyca.com, LinkedIn, Twitter, Github, RedBubble Store

Marcus Povey marcus@marcus-povey.co.uk mapkyca https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7615-8299
ORCID iD iconhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-7615-8299

Top Posts & Pages

  • Using Tor as a HTTP Proxy
    Using Tor as a HTTP Proxy
  • Howto: Printing to any printer with an iPad/iPhone and Apple Airprint
    Howto: Printing to any printer with an iPad/iPhone and Apple Airprint
  • Configuring STARTTLS in Exim
    Configuring STARTTLS in Exim
  • Automatic Create and Modified timestamps in MySQL
    Automatic Create and Modified timestamps in MySQL
  • Email yourself your weekly calendar agenda
    Email yourself your weekly calendar agenda
  • PHP Open Graph Parser library
    PHP Open Graph Parser library
  • Cross server SSH Rsync backups done more securely with chroot
    Cross server SSH Rsync backups done more securely with chroot
  • Using Webhooks with IFTTT.com
    Using Webhooks with IFTTT.com
  • Importing CSV file into MariaDB (and probably MySQL too)
    Importing CSV file into MariaDB (and probably MySQL too)
  • Ubuntu 16.04 sound fixes for Intel HDA Azalia
    Ubuntu 16.04 sound fixes for Intel HDA Azalia

mapkyca.com

    All content is © Copyright Marcus Povey 2008-2019 and released under a licence unless otherwise stated.

    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.