[SOLVED] Curl works but not Python requests

Issue

I am trying to fetch a JSON response from http://erdos.sdslabs.co/users/shagun.json. Using browser/Python's href="http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/" rel="noreferrer">Requests library leads to an authentication error, but curl seems to work fine.

curl http://erdos.sdslabs.co/users/shagun.json 

returns the JSON response.

Why would the curl request work while a normal browser or Requests-based request fail?

Solution

Using telnet to check:

$ telnet erdos.sdslabs.co 80
Trying 62.141.37.215...
Connected to erdos.sdslabs.co.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET http://erdos.sdslabs.co/users/shagun.json HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 11:18:58 GMT
Server: Apache
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=juvg7vrg3vs4t00om3a95m4sc7; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: /login
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://erdos.sdslabs.co
X-Powered-By: PleskLin
Content-Length: 1449
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/json

{"email":"[email protected]","username":"shagun","name":"Shagun      
[...]

We see that the web server is responding with a 302 - a redirection to Location /login. Requests and web browsers are obeying that, and reaching the login prompt. However, we see that the web server is also responding with the json you're after, and curl (and telnet) are simple enough to just accept that data.

Best practice would be to fix the web server so that it either doesn't require you to log in, or doesn't give out password-protected data at the same time as asking users to log in.

If you can't change the web server, you could tell the requests module to ignore redirects:

import requests
result = requests.get('http://erdos.sdslabs.co/users/shagun.json', allow_redirects=False)
print result.content

Answered By - Simon Fraser

Answer Checked By - Timothy Miller (WPSolving Admin)