How can I login to a website with Python?

Question

How can I do it? I was trying to enter some specified link (with urllib), but to do it, I need to log in.

I have this source from the site:

<form id="login-form" action="auth/login" method="post">
    <div>
    <!--label for="rememberme">Remember me</label><input type="checkbox" class="remember" checked="checked" name="remember me" /-->
    <label for="email" id="email-label" class="no-js">Email</label>
    <input id="email-email" type="text" name="handle" value="" autocomplete="off" />
    <label for="combination" id="combo-label" class="no-js">Combination</label>
    <input id="password-clear" type="text" value="Combination" autocomplete="off" />
    <input id="password-password" type="password" name="password" value="" autocomplete="off" />
    <input id="sumbitLogin" class="signin" type="submit" value="Sign In" />

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Websites in general can check authorization in many different ways, but the one you're targeting seems to make it reasonably easy for you.

All you need is to POST to the auth/login URL a form-encoded blob with the various fields you see there (forget the labels for, they're decoration for human visitors). handle=whatever&password-clear=pwd and so on, as long as you know the values for the handle (AKA email) and password you should be fine.

Presumably that POST will redirect you to some "you've successfully logged in" page with a Set-Cookie header validating your session (be sure to save that cookie and send it back on further interaction along the session!).

Answer 2

Maybe you want to use twill, it's quite easy to use and should be able to do what you want.

It will look like the following:

from twill.commands import *
go('http://mysite.org')

fv("1", "email-email", "blabla.com")
fv("1", "password-clear", "testpass")

submit('0')

You can use showforms() to list all forms once you used go(...) to browse to the site you want to login. Just try it from the python interpreter.

Answer 3

import cookielib
import urllib
import urllib2

url = 'http://www.someserver.com/auth/login'
values = {'email-email' : '[email protected]',
          'password-clear' : 'Combination',
          'password-password' : 'mypassword' }

data = urllib.urlencode(values)
cookies = cookielib.CookieJar()

opener = urllib2.build_opener(
    urllib2.HTTPRedirectHandler(),
    urllib2.HTTPHandler(debuglevel=0),
    urllib2.HTTPSHandler(debuglevel=0),
    urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cookies))

response = opener.open(url, data)
the_page = response.read()
http_headers = response.info()
# The login cookies should be contained in the cookies variable

See http://docs.python.org/library/urllib2.html for more information.

Answer 4

Typically you'll need cookies to log into a site, which means cookielib, urllib and urllib2. Here's a class which I wrote back when I was playing Facebook web games:

import cookielib
import urllib
import urllib2

# set these to whatever your fb account is
fb_username = "[email protected]"
fb_password = "secretpassword"

class WebGamePlayer(object):

    def __init__(self, login, password):
        """ Start up... """
        self.login = login
        self.password = password

        self.cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
        self.opener = urllib2.build_opener(
            urllib2.HTTPRedirectHandler(),
            urllib2.HTTPHandler(debuglevel=0),
            urllib2.HTTPSHandler(debuglevel=0),
            urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(self.cj)
        )
        self.opener.addheaders = [
            ('User-agent', ('Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; '
                           'Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)'))
        ]

        # need this twice - once to set cookies, once to log in...
        self.loginToFacebook()
        self.loginToFacebook()

    def loginToFacebook(self):
        """
        Handle login. This should populate our cookie jar.
        """
        login_data = urllib.urlencode({
            'email' : self.login,
            'pass' : self.password,
        })
        response = self.opener.open("https://login.facebook.com/login.php", login_data)
        return ''.join(response.readlines())

You won't necessarily need the HTTPS or Redirect handlers, but they don't hurt, and it makes the opener much more robust. You also might not need cookies, but it's hard to tell just from the form that you've posted. I suspect that you might, purely from the 'Remember me' input that's been commented out.