Authenticating EventBrite with localhost environment

[Ryan]

Hi, my issue appears to be similar to this thread.

I’ve installed the 3.10.1 release of the EventBrite plugin and I’ve ran through the steps in your setup guide a number of times. Each time I get to the point where I click the Get Authentication button, and then click Accept on the Eventbrite screen. But when I’m taken back to my localhost WP admin area, the integration does not appear to be active. None of the Eventbrite settings are available for use inside of an event.

Based on the advice in the first link, I installed ngrok and got that setup with my own custom tunnel URL. My tunnel URL works just fine now when used in a browser to access my localhost site. But when I try to use that tunnel URL in my Eventbrite OAuth settings, still no dice. What I’ve tried is inserting the tunnel URL in place of the http://localhost/ in my Auth URL field in both the WP backend and in Eventbrite developer settings. I’ve also played around with putting the tunnel URL in the Application URL field in Eventbrite. No combination that I’ve tried has worked successfully – same issues as before. The only change is that when using the tunnel URL, I’m taken back to my website homepage on redirect rather than to the WP backend. But the Eventbrite options are still not enabled.

What am I missing here?

Thanks!

[Nico]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for reaching out on this, and also for searching the forums for a possible solution to this.

For this to work the test site should be available to talk to other sites, that’s why I suggested the Local tunnel approach. Haven’t tested this myself and I guess the different software/services might have different config/setups I’m not sure of. Is it possible for you to test this in a live site? Maybe in a sub-folder of another live site?

If that’s not possible I will try it myself but not sure if I can allocate much time for this test, as this not a bug on our product and configuration plays a big part on this working or not – I mean local server configuration, local firewall, local tunnel service config, etc.

Let me know if you can test it in a live site, else I’ll try this myself locally and let you know,
Best,
Nico

[Ryan]

Hi Nico,

Thanks for the reply. While it’d be possible for me to test on a live site – where I have little doubt it would work flawlessly – my goal here is to get this working in my local environment where I do all my development.

If you’re able to do further testing I would really appreciate it. Plus I think it would be really valuable for your other users who are likely coding on localhost and may be running into similar issues. Having a solid solution to point to would be a good resource for everyone.

[Nico]

Hey,

You made your point Ryan! I’ll surely give it a try and let you know. I’m afraid I’m not be able to do so today, but I hope I have some time for this tomorrow.

Best,
Nico

[Nico]

Ryan,

Just wanted to give you a quick update: I’m a bit delayed to jump into this. Hope to do so tomorrow or at least on Monday.

Cheers,
Nico

[Nico]

Ryan,

Reaching out to give a heads-up on this. I tried using ngrok on windows and couldn’t get EB working but ‘almost’, I’ll describe the process as you might find it helpful for further testing:

1. Install ngrok.
2. Expose my local site running ngrok.
3. Configured my WordPress URLs to match the one provided by ngrok. You can add those to wp-config.php like this:

define('WP_HOME', 'http://xxx.ngrok.io/site_directory/' );
define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://xxx.ngrok.io/site_directory/' );

4. Logged into WP-Admin via http://xxx.ngrok.io/site_directory/wp-admin/.
5. Created a new EB App with appropriate oauth callback: http://xxx.ngrok.io/site_directory/tribe-oauth/eventbrite/.
6. Input Application and Secret Client Keys in WP-Admin.
7. Clicked ‘Get Authorization’.
8. Allow it in EB.
9. Correctly got back to my ngrok site, but authorization seemed not fail nor to complete.

My conclusion is this is far more complicated than just using an online test site. I’m not familiar with this kind of techniques so not sure why it’s not working, and also not sure if this is secure at all. Further investigation on this will be out of my support scope, but if you are really interested in this working I don’t think it’s impossible. Maybe just using a different ‘tunneling’ service gets this working, but of course not sure at all.

I hope you find this info valuable, and that you understand I cannot spend more time on this.

Please let me know how you feel about it,
Best,
Nico

[Ryan]

Thanks, Nico. Appreciate you giving it a shot. Sounds like you took a little different approach then I did but we both got stuck at the same place.

I’m not sure where to start on debugging this so I’ll probably just try to do the dev for EB on my live server. Not a great workflow but hey that’s how it goes sometimes. If I ever do get this working on localhost I’ll post back here on the forum.

[Ryan]

Hi Nico,

Actually, I just remembered that your team demonstrates getting Eventbrite authenticated with localhost in your video: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/configuring-eb-tickets/

I’ve – repeatedly – followed the exact same steps in that video and everything works up until the point where Eventbrite returns to WordPress. I’ve tried both my default localhost URLs and my ngrok custom URLs in the API settings with no success on either front. The thing is, in the return URL I’m seeing when I arrive back at the Eventbrite setting’s past after authenticating is this: /wordpress/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=tribe_events&page=tribe-events-calendar&tab=eventbrite&success=1. This is leading me to think the issue here is with the Eventbrite plugin itself. I don’t know all the ins and outs of how the authentication is working here, but it seems like Eventbrite is returning a success message but your plugin isn’t processing it properly somehow.

Can your team take another look at this? I really do need this to work on localhost. Even if I do authenticate on my live server, every time I want to do changes I’m going to have to jump through ridiculous hoops to make changes on the server, and then copy changes into my main codebase. My current feeling is there is a bug in your plugin and I’d really appreciate if your team can at least look into this further.

[Nico]

Hey Ryan,

Thanks for the feedback and sorry for the delay in my reply, I was a bit busy yesterday. I’ll take another look at that and let you know about it. Regarding the video, I’m aware the EventBrite API changed recently so maybe what’s in the video is no longer possible. I’ll ping the team to check on that also.

Thanks for your patience on this,
Best,
Nico

[Ryan]

Hey Nico,

Any updates? This is still an outstanding issue for me. Thanks for looking into it!

[Nico]

Ryan,

Really sorry to say this was out of my radar! I’ll catch up on further testing tomorrow!

Thanks for the heads up,
Nico

[Nico]

Ryan,

Gave ngrok another try but couldn’t get it working. I’ll try to use other services to achieve this 🙁

Best,
Nico

[Nico]

Hey Ryan,

Done another test, but as per suggestion of one of our devs, I tried it from localhost but without a LocalTunnel. To my surprise it worked smoothly.

I did it on a fresh WordPress 4.2.2 install, running just The Events Calendar 3.10.1 and Eventbrite Tickets 3.10.2. My local server runs a vanilla Xampp install.

Can you do a test with the versions above?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks,
Nico

[Ryan]

Nico, that’s good news.

Obviously both you and I have tried the authentication using just localhost without ngrok before, but not with a vanilla WP install. So clearly there must be a conflict going on with either another WP plugin or another application that’s running. Have you tried adding back in the other plugins from your previous environment and seeing if any of them prevent the Eventbrite authentication?

I will do the same with my environment by sometime this weekend, but if you’re able to take a first pass at seeing if a plugin is conflicting that’d save me considerable pain.

Thanks for working on this!

[Nico]

Hey Ryan,

Indeed good news 🙂

I’ve tried adding other plugins (including Events Calendar PRO) and stills works as a charm!

Let me know how your new test goes,
Have a great weekend,
Nico

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