Python urllib2, basic HTTP authentication, and tr.im

Really cheap solution:

urllib.urlopen('http://user:[email protected]/api') 

(which you may decide is not suitable for a number of reasons, like security of the url)

Github API example:

>>> import urllib, json >>> result = urllib.urlopen('https://personal-access-token:[email protected]/repos/:owner/:repo') >>> r = json.load(result.fp) >>> result.close() 

Take a look at this SO post answer and also look at this basic authentication tutorial from the urllib2 missing manual.

In order for urllib2 basic authentication to work, the http response must contain HTTP code 401 Unauthorized and a key "WWW-Authenticate" with the value "Basic" otherwise, Python won't send your login info, and you will need to either use Requests, or urllib.urlopen(url) with your login in the url, or add a the header like in @Flowpoke's answer.

You can view your error by putting your urlopen in a try block:

try: urllib2.urlopen(urllib2.Request(url)) except urllib2.HTTPError, e: print e.headers print e.headers.has_key('WWW-Authenticate') 

The recommended way is to use requests module:

#!/usr/bin/env python import requests # $ python -m pip install requests ####from pip._vendor import requests # bundled with python url = 'https://httpbin.org/hidden-basic-auth/user/passwd' user, password = 'user', 'passwd' r = requests.get(url, auth=(user, password)) # send auth unconditionally r.raise_for_status() # raise an exception if the authentication fails 

Here's a single source Python 2/3 compatible urllib2-based variant:

#!/usr/bin/env python import base64 try: from urllib.request import Request, urlopen except ImportError: # Python 2 from urllib2 import Request, urlopen credentials = '{user}:{password}'.format(**vars()).encode() urlopen(Request(url, headers={'Authorization': # send auth unconditionally b'Basic ' + base64.b64encode(credentials)})).close() 

Python 3.5+ introduces HTTPPasswordMgrWithPriorAuth() that allows:

..to eliminate unnecessary 401 response handling, or to unconditionally send credentials on the first request in order to communicate with servers that return a 404 response instead of a 401 if the Authorization header is not sent..

#!/usr/bin/env python3 import urllib.request as urllib2 password_manager = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithPriorAuth() password_manager.add_password(None, url, user, password, is_authenticated=True) # to handle 404 variant auth_manager = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_manager) opener = urllib2.build_opener(auth_manager) opener.open(url).close() 

It is easy to replace HTTPBasicAuthHandler() with ProxyBasicAuthHandler() if necessary in this case.

I would suggest that the current solution is to use my package urllib2_prior_auth which solves this pretty nicely (I work on inclusion to the standard lib.

Same solutions as Python urllib2 Basic Auth Problem apply.

see https://stackoverflow.com/a/24048852/1733117; you can subclass urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler to add the Authorization header to each request that matches the known url.

class PreemptiveBasicAuthHandler(urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler): '''Preemptive basic auth. Instead of waiting for a 403 to then retry with the credentials, send the credentials if the url is handled by the password manager. Note: please use realm=None when calling add_password.''' def http_request(self, req): url = req.get_full_url() realm = None # this is very similar to the code from retry_http_basic_auth() # but returns a request object. user, pw = self.passwd.find_user_password(realm, url) if pw: raw = "%s:%s" % (user, pw) auth = 'Basic %s' % base64.b64encode(raw).strip() req.add_unredirected_header(self.auth_header, auth) return req https_request = http_request 

Try python-request or python-grab