I have been playing with the Freshbooks API and the Twilio API as part of a contest that Twilio is running. It’s a great excuse to try something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

I ran into a few problems.

The freshbooks gem doesn’t work under 1.9.2, which I found out after trying to deploy to Heroku and then trying locally under RVM. The error was:

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NoMethodError in OutstandingController#index
undefined method `gsub!' for :invoice_id:Symbol

Someone made a compatible gem on Github that you can use by using the following in your Gemfile instead of gem “freshbooks”:

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gem 'bcurren-freshbooks.rb',
  :require => 'freshbooks',
  :git => 'git://github.com/bcurren/freshbooks.rb'

There were a couple of differences I found:

• Instead of using FreshBooks.setup to enter your credentials, use FreshBooks::Base.establish_connection
• The original gem let you do FreshBooks::Invoice.send_by_email(id), the bcurren one makes it an instance method… FreshBooks::Invoice.get(id).send_by_email

Those were the only two changes I had to make.

The second problem was with the Twilio gem. I got SSL errors if I had to make calls to Twilio (as opposed to incoming requests from the Twilio API).

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OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError (SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv3 read server certificate B: certificate verify failed):
  app/controllers/phone_controller.rb:8:in `call'

The reason for this problem is that the OpenSSL library is making a call to an HTTPS resource, but it has no way to verify the certificate. There are two ways to fix this problem:

1. Tell OpenSSL not to verify the certificate
2. Give OpenSSL the proper Certification Authority (CA) certificates to verify the certificate

I’ll confess that my normal approach here is #1, but this time I felt like doing it properly… Since the Twilio module includes HTTPParty you can call methods right on the Twilio module. So add an intializer inside config/initializers, such as twilio.rb:

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Twilio::ssl_ca_file File.join(Rails.root, "config/cacert.pem")

Then, all you have to do is grab cacert.pem from somewhere else. Many other gems include it so if you look for the file on your hard drive you should find it. FWIW, the NewRelic one doesn’t work, it only includes the certificates they need. I ended up finding mine in ActiveMerchant.

*edit* I forked the twilio gem to try and bundle the cacerts.pem file, and as I was going through the code I saw that they look for the certs in /etc/ssl/certs unless you use the method above.

After that, things just worked!