Looking at to Automate BOX Acces Token - box-api

Question

I am looking to generate the BOX access token using Refresh Token.
I want to do it periodically before the refresh Token expires.
How can i automate it without logging to the web application.
From the website, i can generate the token. but i am looking at to automate the job to create the token perdiodically to avoid the token expiration.
Any Ideas?

Answer 1

Create a database in which you store the access token, the refresh token, and the generated date of the access token.
When you work in your application, check by the date in the database if your access token is expired. If expired, create a function to generate an access token having a refresh token. Here's the V2 way of generating that access token using cUrl:
curl https://www.box.com/api/oauth2/token \
-d 'grant_type=refresh_token&refresh_token={valid refresh token}&client_id={your_client_id}&client_secret={your_client_secret}' \
-X POST
which will return a json answer like this:
{
"access_token": "T9cE5asGnuyYCCqIZFoWjFHvNbvVqHjl",
"expires_in": 3600,
"restricted_to": [],
"token_type": "bearer",
"refresh_token": "J7rxTiWOHMoSC1isKZKBZWizoRXjkQzig5C6jFgCVJ9bUnsUfGMinKBDLZWP9BgR"
}
Here's the link of the original tutorial:
http://developers.box.com/oauth/
Here's an example of getting a new access/refresh token using cUrl and PHP:
function getAccessTokenByRefresh($refreshToken, $client_id, $client_secret){
$defaultOptions = array(
CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false,
CURLOPT_VERBOSE => true,
CURLOPT_HEADER => false,
CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT => false,
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => false,
);
$ch = curl_init('https://www.box.com/api/oauth2/token');
$options = $defaultOptions;
$options[CURLOPT_POST] = true;
$options[CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS] = array(
'grant_type'=>'refresh_token',
'refresh_token'=>$refreshToken,
'client_id'=>$client_id,
'client_secret'=>$client_secret
);
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return json_decode($response, true);
}
After you generated the new access token, save them in the database, and save the time when you generated the access for further comparisons.

Answer 2

You’ll authenticate once to get an access_token but after that a crontab will take care of refreshing the token every 15 minutes. The PHP code is at:
http://liljosh.com/upload-to-box-content-api-without-user-authentication/