Not able to get irb console working with tumblr_client gem

I have very little experience with APIs which is something that I'm trying to change so I'm trying to get started with the Tumblr api. I've installed the tumblr_client gem (documentation here) and am following the instructions. I've created an application on a new Tumblr account and have the necessary OAuth information (consumer_key, consumer_secret, ect.) Actually getting it to do something is proving difficult, so like a good little programmer I'm trying to get the console going to explore a bit.

This requires a bit of setup, so I'm following the instructions here:

The first time that you go to use the irb console, if you have no .tumblr file, it will walk you through the process of generating one. You will be prompted for your consumer_key and consumer_secret (which you can get here: http://www.tumblr.com/oauth/register) and then sent out to the site to verify your account. Once you verify, you will be redirected to your redirect URL (localhost by default) and copy the oauth_verifier back into the console. Then you're all set!

I'm prompted for my key and secret, then I go to the URL where I'm supposed to give authorization. Tumblr gives me a popup which reads "Is it alright for this application to access some of your data and make posts to your account? You are logged in as [email protected]" and the options to cancel or allow. I hit allow and it just takes me into the account itself, at no point am I ever given any kind of verification code that I can put in to get the console working.

At this point I'm stuck and can't go any further so I'm activating the network. Any ideas as to where I'm going wrong?

Solution

Did you specify a redirect or callback url at any point in the oauth config process? It's probably done on tumblr's API website. This url would be your app's endpoint to which Tumblr sends a request to with the user's data. By the way, oauth can sometimes be confounding to set up. You won't be able to use localhost as a callback url, for example, though you can get a temporary domain name with a free local tunneling app.

edit To go into more detail on some of these points ...

callback url: To reiterate, this cannot be localhost. Setting the correct callback url will get you unstuck from your current predicament. Instead of redirecting to the tumblr homepage, you want the confirmation page to redirect to your app. Anyway, I think you're totally sensible to want to test it out before you deploy. But unless you deploy or use a local tunnel, your local application doesn't actually have a URL that can be reached from anywhere except your computer.
local tunnelling services: ngrok, localtunnel. To give an example with ngrok: Say you have a Rails server running on port 3000. Then in another terminal you run ngrok 3000 and you get a url which exposes your local server to the real internet. Note that this changes every time you restart ngrok (unless you pay them). In your application, you should make a unique route for the callback. Say you have a route which matches /oauth_callback to the oauth_callback controller action. Then the route you'd provide as your callback url would be http://MY_CUSTOM_NAME.ngrok.com/oauth_callback.
The controller action: I don't specifically know how Tumblr sends user data to the callback. Perhaps the information is in the headers or maybe it's in the body. It might be JSON or XML. Whatever it is, you can explore the data by placing a breakpoint in your controller action. You can inspect the params, headers, etc. I'd expect that they'd give you some token credentials and probably a user name/email as well.