Urllib2 authentication with API key

Question

Hello Friends,

I am trying to connect to radian6 api, which requires the auth_appkey, auth_user and auth_pass as md5 encryption.

When I am trying to connect using telnet I can get the response xml successfully

telnet sandboxapi.radian6.com 80
Trying 142.166.170.31...
Connected to sandboxapi.radian6.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /socialcloud/v1/auth/authenticate HTTP/1.1
host: sandboxapi.radian6.com
auth_appkey: 123456789
auth_user: [email protected]
auth_pass: 'md5encryptedpassword'

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:17:52 GMT
Content-Type: application/xml
Content-Length: 471

But when I am trying the same in python with the following code,

import urllib
import urllib2

user = '[email protected]'
password = 'md5encryptedpasswrod'
base_url = 'http://sandboxapi.radian6.com/'
api_key = '123456789'

pwman = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
pwman.add_password(None, base_url, user, password)
auth_handler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(pwman)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(auth_handler)
urllib2.install_opener(opener)

req = urllib2.Request('http://sandboxapi.radian6.com/socialcloud/v1/auth/authenticate')
req.add_header('auth_appkey', api_key)
xml = urllib2.urlopen(req).read()

it is throwing the following error trace,

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "connectapi.py", line 17, in <module>
xml = urllib2.urlopen(req).read()
 File"/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 126, in urlopen
return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 397, in open
response = meth(req, response)
File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 510, in http_response
'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 435, in error
return self._call_chain(*args)
File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 369, in _call_chain
result = func(*args)
File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 518, in http_error_default
raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 401: Unauthorized

I don't know what I am missing. Is it the API key or md5 encrypted password that is why I am being unauthorized?
Your wisdom will be much appreciated to save my day.

Answer 1

In your telnet session, you're not setting the Authorization: header, but that's what HTTPBasicAuthHandler uses. (You could listen in on this using wireshark or similar.) Presumably the API doesn't use HTTP Basic Authentication but its home-brew variant. You probably want to drop that line and set the HTTP headers manually.