Create authenticated API for uploading photos

[François Marier]

It has been suggested that Libravatar should have an API for manipulating account data.

The easiest and most obvious use case for this would be to upload a photo from a command-line program (which would be similar to doing the same from a smartphone for example).

Piston looks like a good Django plugin to use:

  https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home

and is already packaged in Debian and part of Squeeze.

Once we have photo uploads working (maybe using basic auth or OAuth), then the API could be extended further to allow things like:

- getting list of photos you have uploaded and downloading them
- deleting one of your photos
- assigning a photo to an email address
- exporting your account

However, this bug is just about the basic photo upload API and a sample command line tool that takes a file and uploads it to your account (provided you haven't already uploaded the max number of images).

[François Marier (fmarier)]

Once this works, we should test it using WALint:

  https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/WALint
  https://github.com/mozilla-services/walint

[François Marier (fmarier)]

Daniel Greenfield claims that piston is a stalled project:

  http://pydanny.github.com/the-sorry-state-of-python-oauth-providers.html

[François Marier (fmarier)]

Hawk could be a good way to do this:

  http://ozten.com/psto/2013/05/07/pyhawk-hawk-for-python/

[François Marier (fmarier)]

Note: we would need to think about a federated version of such an API.

An alternative approach is being worked on in https://blueprints.launchpad.net/libravatar/+spec/embedded-version