Python authentication

Question

I want to be able to authenticate to a website and then access some of the private pages in that site. I've looked at some examples and tutorials but I can't get it to work.

For example, I want to access https://www.billmonk.com/home which is available only after authentication. Here's the code I'm using:

url = 'https://www.billmonk.com/home'
values = {'usercontact' : '[email protected]',
          'password' : 'somepass'}

data = urllib.urlencode(values)
req = urllib2.Request(url, data)

cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
urllib2.install_opener(opener)

response = opener.open(req)
the_page = response.read()

This doesn't seem to be working. I always get a page with a "You must be logged in to access this page" page.

Am I missing something obvious?

Thanks!

Cookies aside (which I don't have cause to muck with in Python), some sites have been known to reject Python HTTP requests because they don't like the User-agent field. — msw
– msw, Commented Jul 7, 2010 at 17:17
@msw: From Python docs, "some HTTP servers only allow requests coming from common browsers as opposed to scripts". Interesting. Looks like there's a workaround, though. "headers should be a dictionary, and will be treated as if add_header() was called with each key and value as arguments. This is often used to “spoof” the User-Agent header, which is used by a browser to identify itself". From docs.python.org/library/urllib2.html#urllib2.Request or docs.python.org/py3k/library/… — JAB
– JAB, Commented Jul 7, 2010 at 17:26

Dave Bacher · Accepted Answer · 2010-07-07 17:19:15Z

1

Looking at the source of the BillMonk page, it looks like the login action is a POST to /sign_in (not /home as your code uses).

answered Jul 7, 2010 at 17:19

Dave Bacher

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1 Comment

Rodrigo Over a year ago

Hey, it worked! In my case I needed first to go to /sign_in and then go to /home to get the page I'm interested. Thanks!

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