I’ve been working with Google’s Account Authentication API lately. Specifically working with ClientLogin. One problem I ran into is that ClientLogin says that it may return a response of 403 with an error of “CaptchaRequired”. When that happens you’re supposed to display the provided CAPTCHA image to the user and have them give the answer. This is all fine and good, but Google doesn’t provide a way for you to force this CAPTCHA requirement. To work around this I wrote a quick Ruby script so I can say:

GoogleAuth.setup_captcha("some@email.com")

After that runs, the next time I try ClientLogin with that email address it’s almost guaranteed that the CAPTCHA requirement will happen.

The script is available at http://gist.github.com/11820

As you can see, the script just hammers away trying to log into the given account until Google returns with the CaptchaRequired response.

No this isn’t nice or pretty. Ideally Google would let us pass a parameter that would force the CAPTCHA requirement to happen. Until then, this works.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Code, Ruby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.