Autologin is a library that makes it easier for web spiders to crawl websites that require login. Provide it with credentials and a URL or the html source of a page (normally the homepage), and it will attempt to login for you. Cookies are returned to be used by your spider.
The goal of Autologin is to make it easier for web spiders to crawl websites that require authentication without having to re-write login code for each website.
Autologin can be used as a library, on the command line, or as a service. You can make use of Autologin without generating http requests, so you can drop it right into your spider without worrying about impacting rate limits.
If you are using Scrapy for crawling, check out autologin-middleware, which is a scrapy middleware that uses autologin http-api to maintain a logged-in state for a scrapy spider.
Autologin works on Python 2.7 and 3.3+.
Note
The library is in the alpha stage. API can still change, especially around the keychain UI.
Contents
- Automatically find login forms and fields
- Obtain authenticated cookies
- Obtain form requests to submit from your own spider
- Extract links to login pages
- Use as a library with or without making http requests
- Command line client
- Web service
- UI for managing login credentials
- Captcha support
Don't like reading documentation?
from autologin import AutoLogin url = 'https://reddit.com' username = 'foo' password = 'bar' al = AutoLogin() cookies = al.auth_cookies_from_url(url, username, password)
You now have a cookiejar that you can use in your spider. Don't want a cookiejar?
cookies.__dict__
You now have a dictionary.
Install the latest release from PyPI:
$ pip install -U autologin
or the version with the latest changes from Github:
$ pip install git+https://github.com/TeamHG-Memex/autologin.git
Autologin depends on Formasaurus for field and form classification, which has quite a lot of dependencies. These packages may require extra steps to install, so the command above may fail. In this case install dependencies manually, one by one (follow their install instructions).
A recent pip is recommended (update it with pip install pip -U).
On Ubuntu, the following packages are required:
$ apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev \
libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev \
python-dev # or python3-dev for python 3
This method makes an http request to the URL, extracts the login form (if there is one), fills the fields and submits the form. It then return any cookies it has picked up:
cookies = al.auth_cookies_from_url(url, username, password)
Note that it returns all cookies, they may be session cookies rather than authenticated cookies.
This call is blocking, and uses Crochet to run the Twisted reactor
and a Scrapy spider in a separate thread.
If you have a Scrapy spider (or use Twisted in some other way),
use the HTTP API, or the non-blocking API (it's not documented,
see http_api.AutologinAPI._login).
There are also optional arguments for AutoLogin.auth_cookies_from_url:
settingsis a dictionary with Scrapy settings to override. Useful settings to pass include:HTTP_PROXY,HTTPS_PROXYset proxies to use for all requests.SPLASH_URLif set, Splash will be used to make all requests. Use it if your crawler also uses splash and the session is tied to IP and User-Agent, or for Tor sites.USER_AGENToverrides default User-Agent.
extra_js(experimental) is a string with an extra JS script that should be executed on the login page before making a POST request. For example, it can be used to accept cookie use. It is supported only whenSPLASH_URLis also given insettings.
An example of using this options:
cookies = al.auth_cookies_from_url(
url, username, password,
extra_js='document.getElementById("accept-cookies").click();',
settings={
'SPLASH_URL': 'http://127.0.0.1:8050',
'USER_AGENT': 'Mozilla/2.02 [fr] (WinNT; I)',
})
This method extracts the login form (if there is one), fills the fields and returns a dictionary with the form url and args for your spider to submit. No http requests are made:
>>> al.login_request(html_source, username, password, base_url=None)
{'body': 'login=admin&password=secret',
'headers': {b'Content-Type': b'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'},
'method': 'POST',
'url': '/login'}
Relative form action will be resolved against the base_url.
$ autologin
usage: autologin [-h] [--splash-url SPLASH_URL] [--http-proxy HTTP_PROXY]
[--https-proxy HTTPS_PROXY] [--extra-js EXTRA_JS]
[--show-in-browser]
username password url
You can start the autologin HTTP API with:
$ autologin-http-api
and use /login-cookies endpoint. Make a POST request with JSON body.
The following arguments are supported:
url(required): url of the site where we would like to loginusername(optional): if not provided, it will be fetched from the login keychainpassword(optional): if not provided, it will be fetched from the login keychainextra_js(optional, experimental) is a string with an extra JS script that should be executed on the login page before making a POST request. For example, it can be used to accept cookie use. It is supported only whenSPLASH_URLis also given insettings.settings(optional) - a dictionary with Scrapy settings to override, useful values are described above.
If username and password are not provided, autologin tries to find
them in the login keychain. If no matching credentials are found (they are
matched by domain, not by precise url), then human is expected to eventually
provide them in the keychain UI, or mark domain as "skipped".
Response is JSON with a status field with the following possible values:
errorstatus means an error occured,errorfield has more infoskippedmeans that domain is maked as "skipped" in keychain UIpendingmeans there is an item in keychain UI (or it was just created), and no credentials have been entered yetsolvedmeans that cookies were obtained, they are returned in thecookiesfield, inCookie.__dict__format.
Proxies can be specified via HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROOXY keys
in settings argument. Username and password can be specified
as part of the proxy url (the format is protocol://username:password@url).
If you are using proxy with Splash, it is assumed that
you want to have Splash make requests via given proxy,
and not make a request to Splash via proxy.
HTTP_PROXY is always used for Splash.
There is experimental captcha support: if the login form contains a captcha,
we will try to solve it using an external service (DeathByCaptcha),
and will submit it as part of login request. This does not affect API in any
way, you only have to provide environment variables with your DeathByCaptcha
account details: DEATHBYCAPTCHA_USERNAME and DEATHBYCAPTCHA_PASSWORD.
This applies to all APIs: autologin-http-api, autologin, and
the Python API.
You also need to install the decaptcha library:
pip install git+https://github.com/TeamHG-Memex/decaptcha.git
Support is still experimental, new Google ReCaptcha/NoCaptcha are not supported.
Also, it currently works only with splash (when SPLASH_URL is passed in
settings).
Start keychain UI with:
$ autologin-server
Note that both autologin-server and autologin-http-api
are not protected by any authentication.
Keychain UI stores credentials in an sqlite database. It is located near
the library itself by default, which is not always good, especially if you want
to persist the data between updates or do not have write permissions
for that folder. You can configure database location and
secret_key used by the flask app by creating an /etc/autologin.cfg or
~/.autologin.cfg file (should be the same user under which autologin
services are running). Here is an example config that changes default secret_key
and specifies a different database path (both items are optional):
[autologin] secret_key = 8a0b923820dcc509a6f75849b db = /var/autologin/db.sqlite
Source code and bug tracker are on github: https://github.com/TeamHG-Memex/autologin.
Run tests with tox:
$ tox
Splash support is not tested directly here, but there are indirect tests for it in the autologin-middleware test suite.
License is MIT.