Access LinkedIn REST API without front-end (e.g. OAuth2 redirect)

Question

Goal

Fetch a company's updates save them locally in a background task

Problem

This should be done as a backend service without any real user interaction. We could provide a user account to use, but the authentication is a problem: There is literally no one to answer the OAuth redirect and there is no public redirect URL to configure, since it's a background service.

Is there any way to access the API without having a redirect URL or a real user?

Answer 1

You can get an initial access token in a regular front end flow, for you as the app developer i.e yourself as the LinkedIn user. Once you've got that, you can store it in the backend and use it for 60 days to get access to the LinkedIn APIs.

After 60 days you need to refresh the token as documented in: https://developer.linkedin.com/documents/handling-errors-invalid-tokens

Unfortunately LinkedIn does not (yet) support an autonomous refresh flow where your app can get a new access token by presenting a refresh token on a backchannel. So the developer will have to refresh the access token by a manual login every 2 months.