Python requests module login using session - python-requests

Question

I have a intranet application which i'm able to login using username/password.
Im trying to access the same application using python requests passing my username/password but that does not work. Its a difficult task to get a application support.
Meanwhile, I want to see if I can login using the session the web application created which is in my other browser.
How can I just pass the session using the requests module.

Answer 1

You may need to send data among username and password (usually this data is generated randomly by the server and are inside <input type="hidden"> form elements) which we prevent the CSRF (cross-site request forgery) attack. You may also need to send cookies the Web server send to you.
So, to solve your problem you need to:
Create a requests session to handle cookies;
Request the login page (where the form is) and extract CSRF data;
Post CSRF data among your credentials to the form action URL.
The code will be like this:
import requests
LOGIN_URL = '...' # put URL here
# replace 'user' and 'pass' with form field names for credentials
CREDENTIALS = {'user': '...', 'pass': '...'}
session = requests.session()
# get cookies and CSRF data
response = session.get(LOGIN_URL)
csrf_data = ... # extract data from response.text in a dict
# post data
csrf_data.update(CREDENTIALS)
# you may change LOGIN_URL below with form's 'action' URL if they differ
response = session.post(LOGIN_URL, data=csrf_data)
# now check response.text to see if you're logged in
There are many ways to extract CSRF data, such as: simple string manipulation, regular expressions or more specialized libraries such as lxml and BeautifulSoup (it depends on your input HTML and familiarity with the methods).