This is an example project that demonstrates how to connect to Nylas via OAuth, using Nylas' hosted OAuth flow.

This example uses the Flask web framework to make a small website, and uses the Flask-Dance extension to handle the tricky bits of implementing the OAuth protocol. Once the OAuth communication is in place, this example website will contact the Nylas API to learn some basic information about the current user, such as the user's name and email address. It will display that information on the page, just to prove that it can fetch it correctly.

In order to successfully run this example, you need to do the following things:

To do this, make a Nylas Developer account. You should see your client ID and client secret on the dashboard, once you've logged in on the Nylas Developer website.

Open the config.json file in this directory, and replace the example client ID and client secret with the real values that you got from the Nylas Developer dashboard. You'll also need to replace the example secret key with any random string of letters and numbers: a keyboard mash will do.

The OAuth protocol requires that all communication occur via the secure HTTPS connections, rather than insecure HTTP connections. There are several ways to set up HTTPS on your computer, but perhaps the simplest is to use ngrok, a tool that lets you create a secure tunnel from the ngrok website to your computer. Install it from the website, and then run the following command:

ngrok http 5000

Notice that ngrok will show you two "forwarding" URLs, which may look something like http://ed90abe7.ngrok.io and https://ed90abe7.ngrok.io. (The hash subdomain will be different for you.) You'll be using the second URL, which starts with https.

Alternatively, you can set the OAUTHLIB_INSECURE_TRANSPORT environment variable in your shell, to disable the HTTPS check. That way, you'll be able to use localhost to refer to your app, instead of an ngrok URL. However, be aware that you won't be able to do this when you deploy your app to production, so it's usually a better idea to set up HTTPS properly.

Once you have a HTTPS URL that points to your computer, you'll need to tell Nylas about it. On the Nylas Dashboard click on the Application Dropdown Menu on the left, then "View all Applications". From there, select "Edit" for the app you'd like to use and select the "Application Callbacks" tab. Paste your HTTPS URL into the text field, and add /login/nylas/authorized after it. For example, if your HTTPS URL is https://ad172180.ngrok.io, then you would put https://ad172180.ngrok.io/login/nylas/authorized into the text field in the "Application Callbacks" tab.

Then click the "Add Callback" button to save.

This project depends on a few third-party Python modules, like Flask. These dependencies are listed in the requirements.txt file in this directory. To install them, use the pip tool, like this:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Finally, run the example project like this:

python server.py

Once the server is running, visit the ngrok URL in your browser to test it out!