LinkedIn

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LinkedIn is the world's largest professional networking website. This company is wholly owned by Microsoft in the year of 2016. This platform is primarily used for building connections in your industry and staying in touch with colleagues, past, and present. LinkedIn will help you to get opportunities by showcasing your unique skills, experience, and education. It can also be used to organize events, post updates, and lots more. This platform can be used in mobile apps and websites.

• 1 Authorization
  • 1.1 OAuth 2.0 Authentication
  • 1.2 API key Authentication
• 2 LinkedIn Connections
  • 2.1 OAuth 2.0 Connection
  • 2.2 API Key Connection
• 3 Actions
  • 3.1 Share a Post

Authorization

OAuth 2.0 Authentication

LinkedIn is an Identify Provider of your application. You can log in with your Google, Facebook, or GitHub account. To authenticate LinkedIn you need to follow the below steps:

• Create a LinkedIn app

• Create an application that can authenticate users with LinkedIn

To create a LinkedIn app you first need to visit the below link: https://www.linkedin.com/developers/

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Now, you need to log in with your LinkedIn Account. Sign in to your LinkedIn account for creating your app.

After the completion of the login process now, you need to create the app. Fill in the fields of the app and press the create app button:

To create the app you will need the company’s LinkedIn page. If you don’t have it, then please press the button: + Create a new LinkedIn Page

Please note, If need to enter a valid LinkedIn page to avoid getting an error.

After this step, you will be able to get the LinkedIn app dashboard.

Now, you need to verify your app. This is required, as LinkedIn wants to be sure that this app belongs to the company page that has been selected by you at the time of the App creation. After clicking on this button you will get a verification URL, and by visiting this URL you will be able to verify this app.

Now, you need to sign in with your LinkedIn account to visit the app. Go to the dashboard and visit the products tab to select the Sign In with LinkedIn Product. The product can be added after the completion of the legal agreement acceptance. You will now have to wait for the approval of your LinkedIn product addition. After the completion of this step you will be able to view this in your product tab:

You can see the status of the product is in Review in Progress, therefore you have to wait for it. This process will take a time of few minutes.

You should view this product on the list of your products after the approval:

Now, you need to get the Client ID and Client Secret. Also, add the direct URL.

In the Auth ta,b you will have the access to your Client ID and Client Secret these information you will be needed to authenticate users with LinkedIn.

Here, you will also be needed to add a redirect URL to the list of Redirect URLs:

Scopes

A scope is a mechanism in OAuth 2.0 authentication, that limit application’s that help you to access a user’s account. An application can request one or more scopes, it can be presented to the user’s consent screen. The access token can be issued to the application that will be limited to the granted scopes.

The scopes are another vital part of authentication. Be sure that you have access to these scopes:

Now, you need to create an express app that can authenticate users with LinkedIn.

Creating an express application:

Now, initiate passport and express session for authentication

PassportJS is a well-known library for handling authentication. Express-session is another library that helps us keep track of users by using cookies.

If you are not familiar with these libraries there is no problem you can just see the implementation and the description, the implementation is easy.

To use the Passport you need to implement serializeUser and deserializeUser functions. You can passed the user by encrypt this data or can do whatever you need.

Now, you need to Implement LinkedIn Passport Strategy. Passport let us implement the strategies of authentication and there are more than 500 strategies that you can find on their website. Here I used the passport-linkedin-oauth2 strategy.

The ClientID and ClientSecret information is available in your LinkedIn dashboard, you will get the information from the Auth tab.

To get the CallbackURL you need to implement the endpoint and also needed to add it in the list of Redirect URLs in your LinkedIn Auth tab.

The Scope can be found under the Auth tab all the permissions can be view under this field. The Scope is used for providing access.

After the successful authentication, it returns the arguments of this function. We passed the LinkedIn profile to done function so this is going to be the user object.

For more information please visit: LinkedIn Oauth 2.0 Documentation

API key Authentication

The API key helps to identify the calling project for the application or site, this authentication process is used for making the call to an API. This authentication tokens identify a user, a person that used the app or site. This key are supplied by the Client Users and applications calling REST APIs for tracking and controlling the use of the APIs. With the help of the Authenticate API key filter will enables you to authenticate the API key with the API gateway securely. The API key include a key ID for identify the client responsibility based on the API service request. This Authenticate API key needs to be secret, and must be involved with a each request. A confidential secret key can be used to authenticate the API key. The filter of the Authenticate API key can be used to filter the specify where to identify the API key ID and secret key in the request message, this specify the timestamp and options for expiry.

To enable the API key Authentication, you need to first login to the LinkedIn account.

Navigate to the Linked LinkedIn Developers field and login to your LinkedIn account

Now, click on the Create Application. You need to Login again, if required.

You need to fill the app name, privacy policy URL, logo as mentioned below.

Once done you need to click on the create app as shown below.

Now, you need to navigate to the Auth section.

You need to configure your application in the LinkedIn Developer Portal to obtain the Client ID and Client Secret. Now, click on the eye icon after the client secret, you need to copy the client id and client secret for accessing LinkedIn. paste these in the LinkedIn client ID and Client Secret option from the social login page.

After authentication, LinkedIn's authorization server passes an authorization code to your application. Access your website homepage, and click on the address bar for highlighting the website URL. Your application will send this code to LinkedIn and the it will return the access token.

Click the edit icon in front of Redirect URLs option and save this URL in the option.
For example, if http://mywebsite.com is the homepage URL of your website, you need to add http://mywebsite.com/?SuperSocializerAuth=Linkedin or http://mywebsite.com/?HeateorSlAuth=Linkedin in the Redirect URLs option. Now, click on the update button. Your application uses this token to make API calls on behalf of the member.

Now, you need to navigate to the product section for selecting the products. Sign in with your LinkedIn to perform the process.

Provide the confirmation for the addition of the additional products.

For more information please visit: LinkedIn Authentication

LinkedIn Connections

OAuth 2.0 Connection

API Key Connection

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