Python, HTTPS GET with basic authentication

python python-3.x
Tom Squires picture Tom Squires · Aug 9, 2011 · Viewed 198.8k times · Source

Im trying to do a HTTPS GET with basic authentication using python. Im very new to python and the guides seem to use diffrent librarys to do things. (http.client, httplib and urllib). Can anyone show me how its done? How can you tell the standard library to use?

Answer

Andrew Cox picture Andrew Cox · Aug 9, 2011

In Python 3 the following will work. I am using the lower level http.client from the standard library. Also check out section 2 of rfc2617 for details of basic authorization. This code won't check the certificate is valid, but will set up a https connection. See the http.client docs on how to do that.

from http.client import HTTPSConnection
from base64 import b64encode
#This sets up the https connection
c = HTTPSConnection("www.google.com")
#we need to base 64 encode it 
#and then decode it to acsii as python 3 stores it as a byte string
userAndPass = b64encode(b"username:password").decode("ascii")
headers = { 'Authorization' : 'Basic %s' %  userAndPass }
#then connect
c.request('GET', '/', headers=headers)
#get the response back
res = c.getresponse()
# at this point you could check the status etc
# this gets the page text
data = res.read()

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