Why am I getting "Request is missing required authentication credential" when making POST request to YouTube API v3 with Python Requests module?

Question

I am downloading YouTube comments with Python by making POST requests with the Requests module to

https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/commentThreads.

However, even though I am supplying an API key, I am getting the following error message:

{'error': {'code': 401, 'message': 'Request is missing required authentication credential. Expected OAuth 2 access token, login cookie or other valid authentication credential. See https://developers.google.com/identity/sign-in/web/devconsole-project.', 'errors': [{'message': 'Login Required.', 'domain': 'global', 'reason': 'required', 'location': 'Authorization', 'locationType': 'header'}], 'status': 'UNAUTHENTICATED'}}.

From what I can gather, this (and the link) is saying that I need an OAuth 2 token, but I don't feel like that is applicable to the kind of function I am trying to carry out.

Here is the code I am using to make the request:

import requests YOUTUBE_COMMENTS_URL = 'https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/commentThreads' params = { 'part': 'snippet,replies', 'maxResults': 100, 'videoId': video_id, 'textFormat': 'plainText', 'key': ****** } headers = { 'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.169 Safari/537.36' } data = requests.post(self.YOUTUBE_COMMENTS_URL, params=params, headers=headers) results = data.json()

Can anyone tell me why I am getting this error message?

Are you sure those are supposed to be params, instead of data? — John Gordon
– John Gordon, Commented Nov 6, 2020 at 19:18
Indeed is sufficient to have an OAuth token, but is not necessary, since that API call will work OK with only a valid key. Can you assure yourself that key is not an empty string? Note also that the maximum value allowed for maxResults is 50. — stvar
– stvar, Commented Nov 6, 2020 at 19:54
@JohnGordon You might be right actually. Do you know what I would have to change with regards to the info that I am passing if I change it to data? — Charlie Armstead
– Charlie Armstead, Commented Nov 6, 2020 at 23:59
@stvar I am sure that it is not anempty string - I get the same error if I pass it explicitly with the key. Thanks for the tip about the maxResults. — Charlie Armstead
– Charlie Armstead, Commented Nov 7, 2020 at 0:01

stvar · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-07 09:56:42Z

(Sorry, Charlie, I should have noticed the problem earlier.)

The problem with your code is as follows: since you're invoking the HTTP POST method on the URL:

https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/commentThreads,

it means that you really are invoking the CommentThreads.insert API endpoint, and not CommentThreads.list.

This explains why the API complains about not receiving an OAuth token, since CommentThreads.insert do require such kind of authorization.

Do notice that the two endpoints have the same URL, yet what differentiates one from the other is the HTTP method that invoked each:

GET for CommentThreads.list, and
POST for CommentThreads.insert.

Therefore, to fix your code you'll have to have something like:

data = requests.get( YOUTUBE_COMMENTS_URL, params = params, headers = headers )

Note also that passing params is simply OK (it's not necessary to pass the request's parameters to data).

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