File Uploads in Django from urllib - django

Question

I have small django app where you can upload PDF files.
In the past only human beings used the web application.
In the future a script should be able to upload files.
Up to now we use ModelBackend for authentication (settings.AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS)
Goal
A script should be able to authenticate and upload files
My current strategy
I add a new user remote-system-foo and give him a password.
Somehow log in to the django web application and then upload pdf files via a script.
I would like to use the requests library for the http client script.
Question
How to login into the django web application?
Is my current strategy the right one, or are there better strategies?

Answer 1

You can use the requests library to log into any site, you of course need to tailor the POST depending on which parameters your site requires. If things aren't trivial, take a look at the post data in Chrome's developer tools from when you log in to your site. Here is some code I used to log into a site, it could easily be extended to do what ever you need it to do.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs
import requests
data = requests.session.get(page)
soup = bs(data.text, "lxml")
# Grab csrf token
# soup.find(...) or something
# The POST data for authorizing, this may or may not have been a django
# site, so see what your POST needs
data = {
'user[login]': 'foo' ,
'user[password]': 'foofoo',
}
# Act like a computer, and insert token here, not with data!
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1)
AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95
Safari/537.36', 'X-CSRF-Token': token
}
requests.session.post('https://www.examplesite.com/users/sign_in', data=data,
headers=headers)
Now, your session is logged in and you should be able to upload your pdf. But I've never tried to upload via requests. Take a look at the relevant requests documentation
That being said, this feels like a strange solution. You might consider uploading the files as fixtures or RunSQL, or rather, their location (eg AWS bucket url) to the database. But this is new territory for me.
Hope it helps.

Answer 2

We use this library now: https://github.com/hirokiky/django-basicauth
This way we use http-basic-auth for API views and session/cookie auth for interactive human beings.

Answer 3

Since I found no matching solution, I wrote and published this:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/tbzuploader/
Generic http upload tool.
If the http upload was successfull, files get moved to a “done” sub
directory.
The upload is considered successfull by tbzuploader if the servers
replies with http status 201 Created
Additional features: Handles pairs of files.
For example you have four files: a.pdf, a.xml, b.pdf, b.xml
The first upload should take a.pdf and a.xml, and the second upload
b.pdf and b.xml, then read the docs for –patterns.