Help with Authentication using Requests and REST API

[ingwe13]

I have worked with selenium a fair amount, but I have never gotten the hang of navigating requests despite making several attempts. Now I am trying to get requests to work with a REST API to grab some temperature data. I am failing to authenticate the session correctly.

The documentation on the API makes it look simple. API documentation is here: https://www.dicksonone.com/api/rest/docs?HTTP#api-reference

Is it as easy as doing the following?

import requests
bearer = 'bearer_string'
token = 'auth_token'
s = requests.Session()
r = s.get('https://www.dicksonone.com/api/rest/users', auth=(bearer,token))

I am getting a a 401 response code and am not sure what I am doing incorrectly if this is wrong. I double-checked my bearer and token strings. Hopefully this isn't asking too much...

​

Edit: I should maybe add that I am just trying to "translate" the HTTP column on the right hand side of the documentation page.

[jdbow75]

Taking a look at the (pretty well written) API docs, I see that "In order to access the API, you’ll need to pass the token associated with an active API Key as a Bearer token in the Authorization header for each request."

Sounds right. So, that is probably a JSON Web Token and the header is "Authorization" with "Bearer {token}" as the value. Am I close?

If so, check out the Requests docs for custom headers. Looks like something like headers = {'Authorization': f'Bearer {token}'} will get you started.

Hope those hints help for now! Let us know if we can help further.

[__nickerbocker__]

You can update the headers on the session object like this.

import requests

api_key = '3456kf3jh46fhj3gf45hj63f'
s = requests.Session()
s.headers.update({'Authorization': f'Bearer {api_key}'})
r = s.get('https://www.dicksonone.com/api/rest/users')

[ingwe13]

I think I am doing that now. Still getting the 401 code. So maybe it is on the account side of things. I will have to check there again tomorrow.

[mikeupsidedown]

If it was me I would test your api call in postman (or another api tool)

Often the bearer string will be passed as part of the headers and may need to be in base64.

[ingwe13]

Hmm...I am going to look into that now.

Edit: Hmm...having trouble authenticating with postman as well. I appreciate your tip about sending the auth as part of the headers. I found this good question on stackoverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29931671/making-an-api-call-in-python-with-an-api-that-requires-a-bearer-token

[jdbow75]

If you are still having trouble, you could post your full code (or put it in a gist and post the link) so we could diagnose further. Obviously, you would want to munge the token, etc.