Netflix API for Ruby¶ ↑

Copyright © 2012 Dean Holdren

To install: gem install netflix

This gem uses Netflix’s OAuth REST API, you first need to register an application with Netflix at developer.netflix.com/apps/register/

This will provide you with a “consumer key”, “consumer secret”, and “application name”

To use unauthenticated features (catalog search):¶ ↑

• You can download the full XML catalog if you like. It’s quite large and takes a while.

  1. Do this code

  client = Netflix::Client.new
  catalog = client.catalog
  catalog.download_index("path_to_giant_xml_file.xml")
  

  1. Wait.

To use authenticated features (i.e. queue management):¶ ↑

• Set the consumer/developer config:

  Netflix::Client.consumer_key = <your consumer/developer key>
  Netflix::Client.consumer_secret = <your consumer/developer secret>

• Do OAuth dance: (This is a one-time per user step, save the result somewhere.)

  1. Interactive (commandline/irb): This will open a netflix.com web page to ask the user to authenticate, and provide a pin.

     access_token = Netflix::Client.new.oauth
     

  2. or Web application (Rails/Sinatra/etc), define a URL that can handle the callback

     request_token, auth_url = Netflix::Client.new.oauth_via_callback(my_callback_url)
     session[:request_token] = request_token
     redirect_to auth_url
     

     Then in the handler for “my_callback_url” (i.e. a Rails controller action) retrieve the :oauth_verifier out of the request params

     oauth_verifier = params[:oauth_verifier]
     request_token = session[:request_token]
     access_token = Netflix::Client.new.handle_oauth_callback(request_token, oauth_verifier)
     

• After OAuth credentials are established:

  access_token = access_token.token
  access_secret = access_token.secret
  user_id = access_token.params["user_id"]
  

  (Record these, for example in a User table in a database)

  client = Netflix::Client.new(access_token, access_token_secret)
  user = client.user(user_id)
  queue = user.available_disc_queue
  discs = queue.discs
  disc_one = discs[0]
  puts "#{disc_one.title} #{disc_one.id}"
  queue.remove(1) #queue is 1-based, so this is first disc
  

Credits¶ ↑

This work is based on: REST API documentation of Netflix (developer.netflix.com), with some help from twitter gem for OAuth ideas github.com/jnunemaker/twitter/

Some extra work from the [Goodfilms](goodfil.ms) team