Connecting to https in Lua, Help needed

[Vhati]

I'm tinkering with the idea of reading messages live from twitter (from a group of people simultaneously watching a movie) and using osd to show them as if they were subtitles...

The hangup is that Twitter's live API only accepts a POST request over https.

VLC's lua can do a GET by letting an access module do all the work...

Code: Select all

local stream = vlc.stream("https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt") local data = "" while data do data = stream:read(65536) vlc.msg.dbg("[appname] ".. data) break end

This would be great but the access module won't POST.

Note: Some servers run afoul of gnutls root cert issues, but luckily not the google test url above or twitter, on my system. Incidentally certs are read from a file (~/.vlc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt) on linux and a MMC snap-in (certmgr.msc) on windows.


The alternative seems to be vlc.net.connect_tcp(host, port), but that looks like I'd have to handle TLS myself.


For the curious, here's the easy way to query Twitter.*
Lookup a user's numeric id to hardcode in a script (look for /user/id)...

Code: Select all

https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?screen_name=CHANGE_ME or https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=CHANGE_ME

curl -d "follow=THAT_ID" "https://YOUR_USER:YOUR_PASS@stream.twit ... ilter.json"
Then you get a continuous line-oriented json of tweets as they happen. This'll be pretty quiet unless an event is planned.
I just can't figure out how to send that "follow=012345" POST data.

Tantalizingly, I can use the access module to GET a rather overwhelming sample stream intended for testing.
curl "https://YOUR_USER:YOUR_PASS@dev.twitter ... ses/sample"
That'll result in a very busy terminal.


* The more elaborate OAuth method is what's officially recommended; if I can get this working, I can reference the Share on Twitter extension for that.

[Vhati]

Hrm, I probably wouldn't be able to poll the a vlc.stream() object to avoid blocking.

Requesting a vlc.net func to open a TLS'd connection may be asking too much...

[Vhati]

Wow, I must've been looking at an old API doc at the time (Google's cache circa 2012-04-12 only mentioned POST).
The link I included in the post above resolved my immediate problem.

"Both GET and POST requests are supported"

Which means this works.
curl "https://YOUR_USER:YOUR_PASS@stream.twit ... ow=THAT_ID"

Now I just have to periodically read chunks from the stream, osd a couple of the recent tweets, and silently consume the rest, while trying to avoid blocking or buffer capacity issues...