How to programmatically replicate a request found in Chrome Developer Tools?

Question

I'm looking at my balance on Venmo.com but they only show you 3 months at a time and I'd like to get my entire transaction history.

Looking at the Chrome Developer Tools, under the network tab, I can see the request to https://api.venmo.com/v1/transaction-history?start_date=2017-01-01&end_date=2017-01-31 which returns JSON.

I'd like to programmatically iterate through time and make several request and aggregate all of the transactions. However, I keep getting 401 Unauthorized.

My initial approach was just using Node.js. I looked at the cookie in the request and copied it into a secret.txt file and then sent the request:

import fetch from 'node-fetch'
import fs from 'fs-promise'

async function main() {
  try {
    const cookie = await fs.readFile('secret.txt')  
    const options = {
      headers: {
        'Cookie': cookie,
      }, 
    }
    try {
      const response = await fetch('https://api.venmo.com/v1/transaction-history?start_date=2016-11-08&end_date=2017-02-08', options)
      console.log(response)
    } catch(e) {
      console.error(e)
    }
  } catch(e) {
    console.error('please put your cookie in a file called `secret.txt`')
    return
  }
}

That didn't work do I tried copying all of the headers over:

const cookie = await fs.readFile('secret.txt')  
const options = {
  headers: {
    'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, sdch, br',
    'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
    'Cache-Control': 'no-cache',
    'Connection': 'keep-alive',
    'Cookie': cookie,
    'Host': 'api.venmo.com',
    'Origin': 'https://venmo.com',
    'Pragma': 'no-cache',
    'Referer': 'https://venmo.com/account/settings/balance/statement?end=02-08-2017&start=11-08-2016',
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.95 Safari/537.36',
  }, 
}
try {
  const response = await fetch('https://api.venmo.com/v1/transaction-history?start_date=2016-11-08&end_date=2017-02-08', options)
  console.log(response)
} catch(e) {
  console.error(e)
}

This also did not work.

I even tried making the request from the console of the website and got a 401:

fetch('https://api.venmo.com/v1/transaction-history?start_date=2016-11-08&end_date=2017-02-08', {credentials: 'same-origin'}).then(console.log)

So my question here is this: I see a network request in Chrome Developer Tools. How can I make that same request programmatically? Preferably in Node.js or Python so I can write an automated script.

Answer 1

In the network tab of Chrome Developer Tools, right click the request and click "Copy" > "Copy as cURL(command)". You can then either write a script using the curl command directly, or use https://curl.trillworks.com/ to convert the cURL command to Python, Node.JS or PHP.