Statuses/update_with_media : Getting "Missing or invalid url parameter"

academdog · 2013-08-23T00:55:43.000Z

I have encountered the same problem. I have a hand-written code using tmhOauth library for posting news with photos attached. It had been working fine since 3 Jul 2013 until 20 Aug 2013. Then API call update_with_media started to fail returning 403 error and json response {“errors”:[{“code”:195,“message”:“Missing or invalid url parameter”}]}. Though I still can publish tweets with pictures manually (via browser). update, search and some other API calls work fine.

P.S. Sorry for my poor English.

maxwell2022 · 2013-09-03T06:36:02.000Z

any update on this issue ?

jayncoke · 2013-09-03T18:52:56.000Z

Sorry for the late reply. I’m the developer that submitted the original issue.

It seemed to work on and off since I posted.

Currently it doesn’t seem to be working.

We’re sending an image/jpg file. It is raw image data that we fetch via carrierwave from Amazon S3.

Edit: Also fyi, we’re using twitter gem version 4.5.0. Perhaps we need to update?
Edit 2: Tried updating to 4.8.1, still the same problem.

jayncoke · 2013-09-03T20:43:48.000Z

Okay, I think I’ve figured it out.

It turns out that the way we’re sending the photo data that we fetch with carrierwave was incorrect:

photo.image.read

We shouldn’t be passing the string of the image data. It should be a File object apparently:

open(photo.image.url)

That change makes everything kosher.

maxwell2022 · 2013-09-03T23:59:00.000Z

I have the same error at the moment. It’s the first time I’m trying to upload a media so for me it never worked. I found this issue (https://dev.twitter.com/issues/1261) that is exactly what I am experiencing. I wrote a message in another discussion, but here is the details:

My application is hosted on AWS (N. Virginia) tested for the past 2-3 hours (5 to 7am UTC) and getting the same error message: “Missing or invalid url parameter”.

Using https://github.com/abraham/twitteroauth :

$params = array();
$params[‘media[]’] = ‘@’.realpath($this->getTempLocalFile($url));
$params[‘status’] = $message;
$response = $this->post(‘statuses/update_with_media’, $params);

I can update “statuses/status” without any problem.

maxwell2022 · 2013-09-04T01:16:05.000Z

I can confirm that it’s coming from Abraham’s twitterAuth library. I’ve switch part of my code to use https://github.com/themattharris/tmhOAuth and it looks like it’s working fine. This library must have an issue in the encoding of the file. I’ll report the bug on github.

Here is the new code I’m using:

$localFile = realpath($this->getTempLocalFile($url));
$params = array();
$params[‘media[]’] = ‘@’.$localFile;

if (null !== $message) {
$params[‘status’] = $message;
}

$tmhOAuth = new \tmhOAuth(array(
‘consumer_key’ => $this->consumerKey,
‘consumer_secret’ => $this->consumerSecret,
‘token’ => $this->oauthToken,
‘secret’ => $this->oauthTokenSecret,
));

$response = $tmhOAuth->user_request(array(
‘method’ => ‘POST’,
‘url’ => $tmhOAuth->url(“1.1/statuses/update_with_media”),
‘params’ => $params,
‘multipart’ => true
));

kingkkarki · 2013-09-06T11:58:17.000Z

i tried this library but it returns 0 to me .

yuf · 2013-09-09T21:13:41.000Z

We are experiencing this issue as well as of sometime last week. We used to be able to post using update_with_media using PHP’s Oauth libarary (which uses Curl) by doing the following:

$msgdata[’@media[]’] = “@file1;type=image/jpeg;filename=file1”;

We had no problem with this until recently, and are now experiencing the same “missing or invalid url” error response. Regular status updates continue to work fine.

Is there any update on if this was a change at Twitter’s end or not? Or what can be done about it?

episod · 2013-09-10T15:42:47.000Z

Our back end definitely changed, and some undocumented behavior that may have enabled your approach to function previously no longer functions. Make sure that the OAuth library you’re using properly handles the case where a POST body is not of the standard x-www-form-urlencoded type (it’s a special case) and that you’re performing a multipart request.

yuf · 2013-09-10T18:10:13.000Z

Any chance you could explain in more detail what you mean by the body being a special case or not? Or what encoding type should be used if not x-www-form-urlencoded? We are definitely sending a multipart request. In case they help, here are the request headers. Trying to figure out post body encoding now.


    [request_headers] => Array
        (
            [user-agent] => 
            [host] => api.twitter.com
            [accept] => */*
            [accept-encoding] => gzip
            [authorization] => OAuth 
            [content-length] => 56277
            [content-type] => multipart/form-data; boundary=----------------------------af7dea0a8938
        )

yuf · 2013-09-10T18:32:22.000Z

Ok… some progress. If I use the pecl Oauth to generate the auth signature, and construct a Curl request myself by setting those up in the header, and then adding the status/media as postfields, it works! BUT, if I do this with only a status (no media, using just the update API endpoint), it fails with auth issues.

Can you explain why this is the case?

yuf · 2013-09-10T22:37:29.000Z

A few hours ago, I had come up with a solution for image posts. Got them to work. Now, it no longer works. Has twitter changed something again?

Now receiving: “Could not authenticate you”

Auth is clearly not the issue here, since I can post normal updates that do not contain media.

It’s like shooting at a moving target here. Please give me any information you can about what exactly changed or is changing.

ss_tatar · 2013-09-11T13:51:21.000Z

Still same!

t_heisk · 2013-10-02T10:23:00.000Z

If you are using Abraham’s Twitter oAuth library and you are getting HTTP401 / Unauthorized or HTTP403 / “Missing or invalid url parameter”, then check this out: https://github.com/abraham/twitteroauth/pull/232

mikeward_aa · 2013-10-05T18:26:50.000Z

I had a similar issue. In my case, it appears that the multipart form boundaries have to start on a new line. This use to not be the case. Example:

Before new backend this worked:

status text–xkkdkkjlskjdfasldjfkasfd

After new backend \r\n required:

status text\r\n–xkkdkkjlskjdfasldjfkasfdj

I looked up the RFC and it simply says the boundary has to be unique, nothing about a \r\n. Without the \r\n on the boundaries, I get the “Missing or invalid url parameter” error.

KawaPanga · 2013-10-11T15:35:00.000Z

Will there be an update on API doc @
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/post/statuses/update_with_media ?
soon ?
Only w.r.t undocumented behavior mentioned above

Edit: Problem was incorrect field names in html form itself, including image data in multipart request

episod · 2013-10-07T18:15:10.000Z

This is an area where hard decisions have to be made about interpreting a slightly vague aspect of a spec. Ruby on Rails is overly loosey-goosey about these things and we don’t wish to continue that behavior.

Our interpretation is as follows.


   The message body is itself a protocol element and MUST
   therefore use only CRLF to represent line breaks between body-parts.
   Unlike in RFC 2046, the epilogue of any multipart message MUST be
   empty; HTTP applications MUST NOT transmit the epilogue (even if the
   original multipart contains an epilogue). These restrictions exist in
   order to preserve the self-delimiting nature of a multipart message-
   body, wherein the "end" of the message-body is indicated by the
   ending multipart boundary.

While this doesn’t say all delimiters need to be broken by newlines, it does specify exactly how those newlines should be presented.


  In the case of multipart entities, in which one or more different
   sets of data are combined in a single body, a "multipart" media type
   field must appear in the entity's header.  The body must then contain
   one or more body parts, each preceded by a boundary delimiter line,
   and the last one followed by a closing boundary delimiter line.

Here we’re considering the delimiter line as having to exist as a single “line” of continuous text. The key word here is “line” which we’re interpreting to mean a distinct line of text rather than the interpreting the characters “–” as a line.

Combining both interpretations together, delimiters need to be on their own line, using CRLF.

IWantMoreToys · 2013-12-06T02:38:52.000Z

Which library works?? Any updates? Does tmhOAuth work?

iamwao · 2014-01-22T20:33:06.000Z

https://github.com/abraham/twitteroauth is working fine for me until now

stefangaemperle · 2014-01-27T19:28:54.000Z

is there any example how it should look like in javascript? What are the parameters and how they have to be sent to work? Authentication is not the problem, but the arguments seems to be difficulty.