How to login to wordpress programmatically?

Question

I need to perform some action in wordpress admin panel programmatically but can't manage how to login to Wordpress using C# and HttpWebRequest.

Here is what I do:

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            string url = "http://localhost/wordpress/wp-login.php";
            HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
            CookieContainer cookies = new CookieContainer();

            SetupRequest(url, request, cookies);
            //request.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8";
            //request.Headers["Accept-Language"] = "uk,ru;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3";
            //request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"] = "gzip,deflate";
            //request.Headers["Accept-Charset"] = "windows-1251,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7";


            string user = "test";
            string pwd = "test";

            request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(user, pwd);

            string data = string.Format(
                "log={0}&pwd={1}&wp-submit={2}&testcookie=1&redirect_to={3}",
                user, pwd, 
                System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode("Log In"),
                System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode("http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/"));

            SetRequestData(request, data);

            ShowResponse(request);
}

private static void SetupRequest(string url, HttpWebRequest request, CookieContainer cookies)
        {
            request.CookieContainer = cookies;
            request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; uk; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)";
            request.KeepAlive = true;
            request.Timeout = 120000;
            request.Method = "POST";
            request.Referer = url;
            request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
        }

        private void ShowResponse(HttpWebRequest request)
        {
            HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
            responseTextBox.Text = (((HttpWebResponse)response).StatusDescription);
            responseTextBox.Text += "\r\n";
            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
            responseTextBox.Text += reader.ReadToEnd();
        }

        private static void SetRequestData(HttpWebRequest request, string data)
        {
            byte[] streamData = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(data);
            request.ContentLength = streamData.Length;

            Stream dataStream = request.GetRequestStream();
            dataStream.Write(streamData, 0, streamData.Length);
            dataStream.Close();
        }

But unfortunately in responce I get only HTML source code of login page and it seems that cookies don't contain session ID. All requests which I perform after that code also return HTML source of login page so I can assume that it does not login correctly.

Can anybody help me to solve that problem or give working example?

---

Main thing which I want to achieve is scanning for new images in Nextgen Gallery plugin for Wordpress. Is there XML-RPC way of doing that?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I see no obvious problem with your code, sorry. But Wordpress has an XML-RPC interface, which has to be enabled in the admin interface. I wrote some python scripts for this interface and it worked like a charm.

Answer 2

Thanks to everyone. I managed how to make it work only when using sockets. Wordpress sends several Set-Cookie headers but HttpWebRequest handles only one instance of such header so some cookies are lost. When using sockets I can get all needed cookies and login to admin panel.

Answer 3

Can you guys let us know what is the solution in code? How would you log-in melodramatically? with a certain username and password ?

Answer 4

I tried this with my WordPress.com account (protected with SSL). I discovered that the easiest way is to use .NET sockets to get the HTTP "Set-Cookie" headers, then parse the headers to .NET Cookie objects and then use to CookieContainer with the cookies for HttpWebRequest.

Easiest way to work with SSL over sockets is to implement SslStream over NetworkStream bound to the socket.

Example:

private void LogIn()
    {
        string fulladdress = "hostname.wordpress.com";
        string username = HttpUtility.UrlEncode("username");
        string password = HttpUtility.UrlEncode("password");

        string formdata = "log={0}&pwd={1}&redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2F{2}%2Fwp-admin%2F&testcookie=1";
        formdata = string.Format(formdata, username, password, fulladdress);
        IPHostEntry entry = Dns.GetHostEntry(fulladdress);


        Socket s = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.IP);
        s.Connect(entry.AddressList[0], 443);

        NetworkStream ns = new NetworkStream(s);

        System.Net.Security.SslStream ssl = new System.Net.Security.SslStream(ns);
        byte[] data = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(String.Format(WpfApplication2.Properties.Resources.LogRequest, "https://" + fulladdress, fulladdress, form.Length, username, password));

        ssl.AuthenticateAsClient(fulladdress);
        ssl.Write(data, 0, data.Length);

        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        byte[] resp = new byte[128];
        int i = 0;
        while (ssl.Read(resp, 0, 128) > 0)
        {
            sb.Append(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(resp));
        }

        List<String> CookieHeaders = new List<string>();
        foreach (string header in sb.ToString().Split("\n\r".ToCharArray(), StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries))
        {
            if (header.StartsWith("Set-Cookie"))
            {
                CookieHeaders.Add(header.Replace("Set-Cookie: ", ""));
            }
        }

        CookieContainer jar = new CookieContainer();
        foreach (string cook in CookieHeaders)
        {
            string name, value, path, domain;
            name = value = path = domain = "";

            string[] split = cook.Split(';');
            foreach (string part in split)
            {
                if (part.StartsWith(" path="))
                {
                    path = part.Replace(" path=", "");
                }
                if (part.StartsWith(" domain="))
                {
                    domain = part.Replace(" domain=", "");
                }
                if (!part.StartsWith(" path=") && !part.StartsWith(" domain=") && part.Contains("="))
                {
                    name = part.Split('=')[0];
                    value = part.Split('=')[1];
                }
            }

            jar.Add(new Cookie(name, value, path, domain));
        }

        HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("https://" + fulladdress + "/wp-admin/index.php");
        req.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3";
        req.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8";
        req.KeepAlive = false;
        req.AllowAutoRedirect = false;
        req.Referer = "https://" + fulladdress + "/wp-login.php";
        req.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
        req.CookieContainer = jar;
        req.AllowAutoRedirect = true;
        req.AutomaticDecompression = DecompressionMethods.GZip;
        req.Method = "GET";
        req.Timeout = 30000;

        HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();

        using (System.IO.StreamReader sr = new System.IO.StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream(), Encoding.UTF8))
        {
            MessageBox.Show(sr.ReadToEnd());
        }
    }

The code is not very efficient, but it illustrates the process of logging into the administration interface.

Hope it helps :)

Answer 5

NameValueCollection loginData = new NameValueCollection();
loginData.Add("username", "your_username");
loginData.Add("password", "your_password");

WebClient client = new WebClient();
string source = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(client.UploadValues("http://www.site.com/login", loginData));

string cookie = client.ResponseHeaders["Set-Cookie"];

Answer 6

I don't know if others will find this helpful, but I just used the WordPress API to log in. I created a user (CRON_USR) who "logs in" at night as part of a cron job and does some tasks. The code is this:

require(dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-load.php' );
$user = wp_authenticate(CRON_USR, CRON_PWD);
wp_set_auth_cookie($user->ID, true, $secure_cookie); //$secure_cookie is an empty string
do_action('wp_login', CRON_USR);
wp_redirect('http://www.mysite.com/wp-admin/');