Rails Omniauth OAuth 2 Faraday Getting Unparsable Binary Result from Google's userinfo Endpoint

Problem

My Rails 3 app's OAuth 2 integration was getting binary return values from Google's servers when accessing https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v1/userinfo. The below monkey patch, which can be put in a Rails initializer, solved the problem.

Solution

require 'omniauth/strategies/oauth2'

module OmniAuth
  module Strategies
    class GoogleOauth2 < OmniAuth::Strategies::OAuth2
      def raw_info
        return @raw_info if @raw_info
        @raw_info ||= access_token.get('https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v1/userinfo').parsed

        if !@raw_info.is_a?(Hash)
          # probably a parse error where we got a binary body...shame on faraday.
          s = RestClient.get("https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v1/userinfo?access_token=#{access_token.token}")
          @raw_info = MultiJson.decode(s)
        end
        @raw_info
      end
    end
  end
end

Discussion

Last week near the 26th, my Devise Omniauth Google OAuth2 logins were failing mysteriously.

The way this OAuth2 flow works, you get a 'code' from Google after the user tells it to authenticate with your application, your app then gets an access token with it, and in the middle of the specific Omniauth provider (in this case, the strategy OmniAuth::Strategies::GoogleOauth2), inside of the raw_info method, it makes a call to Google using the Access Token it just got from the code.

This call is performed by Faraday, an HTTP client that can wrap Net::HTTP. Google was responding to it in a binary format. Faraday tries to parse the result with JSON, and if it fails, it fails silently with a rescue and a return of the raw response body that it just failed to parse.

However, I found that if I used the access token in a plain web browser, I could see the expected JSON result just fine.

Why would it work in my web browser but not from Faraday?

I don't know, but I inserted the above monkey patch. If parsing the result from Google fails, it fires off an additional call with RestClient and the access token as a GET parameter - a perfectly valid OAuth2 call. Stuff like this works with Facebook's OAuth (2?) integration, and their Graph API, as well, I think.

The login failures were not always happening. That the above solved the problem in development mode, locally, is evidence that something weird was going on between Devise, Omniauth, Omniauth OAuth2, Faraday, Net::HTTP, or on Google's end.

As an aside, this is one of the most ridiculous bug work arounds I've ever resorted to.

A Candidate Resolution to the Locke-Rousseau Dichotomy

A resolution to the Lockean-Rousseauian dichotomy may be that the human experience takes place in both of these realities concurrently, with a slight preference for the Rousseauian reality. The human condition has one foot in both at all times. These realities are disjoint. Our traditional fives senses perceive the Lockean world, while our softer senses perceive the Rousseauian world.

This may sound a little contradictory, but if you read carefully, I'm just saying they're disjoint while still both existing quite fine. We don't have to push them together.

I consider this suggestion original. I have not read Locke's Treatise on Human Understanding, nor Rousseau's Emile or Social Contract, but I've read others' summaries of the challenges presented by the argument between these two philosophers.

Our own heritage seems to mostly side with Locke, and all our intelligence these days is bent toward increasing the scope of natural science, i.e. our body of knowledge of the Lockean reality.

I claim this is original because I haven't seen it conclusively suggested yet, though for all I know, the old writing of Kant or Rousseau, or some contemporary philosopher in any of the hundreds of present-day universities, or some private philosopher doing work from the comfort of his own private library, may have already suggested it.

To flesh this out in detail: one of the two realities comprising human experience may be regarded as one of moral freedom, pressure, and personal risk, and within this matrix all of the old sayings and ponderings of virtue suddenly manifest. This state is somewhat like a dream. It is a dream in that you cannot seriously expect to study it with conventional scientific methods, or, if you can, you cannot break the dream down into its nano- or microscale atomic parts. You cannot even break it into human-sensible parts, at least not in the traditional meaning of sense-perception. You can, however, make some judgements and do some scientific-like work with it using reason, as has been done for centuries. This is the Roussiauian world.

And yet, we continue to interact directly with mother nature. We attempt to subdue her and understand her. I am referring to what we do with our machines, automations, and our physics. Our medicine extends life and fights mother nature's attempt to kill us abruptly. This is not completely divorced from what it means to be human, and so our science is not wholly for not. This is the Lockean part of the human experience.

It is the Rousseauian part that is at least essential, if not the most essential. In otherwords, you could create a dreamlike simulation for a person and still provide almost all of the essential elements needed for the human condition, or human experience. While we sleep, we often do.

Moving forward from this, some implications come to the surface:

• Past and ongoing attempts to unify these two worlds can stop. We can replace them with efforts to more clearly articulate what it means for a person to be in both worlds at once, which is what I am very interested in doing as I continue my study of philosophy, including diving deeper into Locke, Rousseau, and their comrades.

• Decartes's interpretation on how we must be distrustful of the dream state is not nearly as panic-inducing as one might think, and it almost appears as if he is unaware of, or trying to forsake, part of the Rousseauian element in the human condition. The same could be said about our dissapointment for any subject of Morpheus from the Matrix who would be content to take Morpheus' blue pill.

• Nietzsche's analysis or morality is not really refuted at all, as he meant quite a lot when he said God was dead, but it does appear as though he assumed that the human experience was not really split into two concurrent realities, as I am suggesting here. He may have based a lot of his nihilism on the assumption that the Lockean world was all we had left, though his analysis of psychology after this seems to have led him straight back to the doorstep, if not far enough to re-enter, the Rousseauian reality again.

• All of the old myths and religions suddenly have renewed value, since their content may be regarded as belonging entirely to the Rousseauian world and thus no longer subject to the demands of empirical science. God is back, it would seem. The very word "myth", in most minds, assumes that only one reality is experienced by a human at a single time, and in today's world that reality, as mentioned, is the Lockean one, and thereby one can quickly swat away the more extraordinary stories as being untrue and "mythical", without realizing that perhaps these stories need to be evaluated in the Rousseauian world.

• Finally, and especially in the light of the just-mentioned point, any of the men who are headstrong and very eager to eradicate any mention of the Rousseauian world, including eradicating religion entirely - are suspect. It would almost be more precise to say "avoid" instead of "eradicate", for I would not be surprised if fear, or darker things, supply the motives that drive this part of such a man (I say "this part" since most men are not completely consistent - many men have conflicting motives and obey different ones at different times). They are attempting to kill what is essential in order to be human, and this is very strange. Something seems to be hidden from us when discussing things with these men. Men like these are easy to conjure up in one's short term memory. They hold considerable power today.

I could go on at great length with the implications but I need to stop at some point, and will stop here. If I am right, then this would hold wide-ranging implications for economics, psychology, and political science.