HTTPS log in with urllib2

Question

I currently have a little script that downloads a webpage and extracta somw data I'm interested in. Nothing fancy.

Currently I'm downloading the page like so:

import commands
command = 'wget --output-document=- --quiet --http-user=USER --http-password=PASSWORD https://www.example.ca/page.aspx'
status, text = commands.getstatusoutput(command)

Although this works perfectly, I thought it'd make sense to remove the dependency on wget. I thought it should be trivial to convert the above to urllib2, but thus far I've had zero success. The Internet is full urllib2 examples, but I haven't found anything that matches my need for simple username and password HTTP authentication with a HTTPS server.

Answer 1

Hi,

this says, it should be straight forward

[as] long as your local Python has SSL support.

If you use just HTTP Basic Authentication, you must set different handler, as described here.

Quoting the example there:

import urllib2

theurl = 'http://www.someserver.com/toplevelurl/somepage.htm'
username = 'johnny'
password = 'XXXXXX'
# a great password

passman = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
# this creates a password manager
passman.add_password(None, theurl, username, password)
# because we have put None at the start it will always
# use this username/password combination for  urls
# for which `theurl` is a super-url

authhandler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(passman)
# create the AuthHandler

opener = urllib2.build_opener(authhandler)

urllib2.install_opener(opener)
# All calls to urllib2.urlopen will now use our handler
# Make sure not to include the protocol in with the URL, or
# HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm will be very confused.
# You must (of course) use it when fetching the page though.

pagehandle = urllib2.urlopen(theurl)
# authentication is now handled automatically for us

If you do Digest, you'll have to set some additional headers, but they are the same regardless of SSL usage. Google for python+urllib2+http+digest.

Cheers,

Answer 2

The urllib2 documentation has an example of working with Basic Authentication:

http://docs.python.org/library/urllib2.html#examples