Django REST API Salesforce OAuth token retrieval failing

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1

I’m working on integrating Salesforce authentication into my Django application using their REST API. I keep running into issues when trying to get the OAuth access token from Salesforce.

auth_data = {
    'client_id': settings.SF_CLIENT_ID,
    'client_secret': settings.SF_CLIENT_SECRET,
    'redirect_uri': 'https://mysite.com/sf/callback/',
    'grant_type': 'authorization_code',
}
encoded_data = urllib.urlencode(auth_data)
response = urllib2.urlopen('https://myinstance.salesforce.com/services/oauth2/token', encoded_data).read()

The request keeps returning a bad request status. I’ve double checked my credentials and the endpoint URL looks correct. Has anyone encountered similar problems with Salesforce OAuth integration? What could be causing this authentication failure?

2

Yeah, the missing authorization code is definitely part of it, but there’s another gotcha I’ve hit with Salesforce OAuth. Your redirect_uri has to match exactly what’s in your Connected App settings - and I mean exactly, including trailing slashes. Salesforce is super picky about this.

Also check your Content-Type header. Salesforce wants ‘application/x-www-form-urlencoded’ for token requests. When I switched from urllib2 to requests, I had to set this explicitly even though it should’ve been automatic.

Add some error logging to see the actual response body - Salesforce’s error messages are usually pretty good at telling you exactly what’s wrong with your parameters.

3

Had this exact problem with Salesforce OAuth in Django last year. Your endpoint URL is wrong - don’t use ‘myinstance.salesforce.com’ for OAuth token requests. Hit the login server instead: ‘https://login.salesforce.com/services/oauth2/token’ for production or ‘https://test.salesforce.com/services/oauth2/token’ for sandbox. Also, urllib2 is deprecated. Switch to the requests library - it handles encoding automatically and gives you way better error messages. I wasted hours debugging auth failures before I figured out the endpoint was the issue.

4

u might be missin the authorization code in the auth_data. that could b why ur getting bad request. make sure to include the ‘code’ from the auth step. also check that ur redirect_uri is spot on with what u set in Salesforce settings - even tiny mistakes mess it up.