djangobot

Curl for Django. Make authenticated requests to a Django server.

How does it work ?

Django authentication relies on two cookies: csrftoken and sessionid. Once you accquire these cookies, you can make authenticated requests just like the browser does.

Getting the csrftoken is easy. Just make a request to a page and the server sends back the cookie.

Sessionid, however is tricky because most production servers configure it as a secure HTTP only cookie. It is only sent if authentication is made securely ( via. HTTPS )

To make a secure connection we need SSL/TLS certificates. GO has a package called autocert which lets us accquire these certificates. Autocert provides automatic access to certificates from Let's Encrypt and any other ACME-based CA.

With certs in place, all we need is the authentication details and we're good to go.

What are the potential use cases for this library ?

• API testing
• Web Scraping
• Automation
• Bot frameworks
• Mobile apps

See an example usage below.

Installation

• Add github.com/hemantasapkota/djangobot as an import to your project.
• Execute go get github.com/hemantasapkota/djangobot

Usage

In this example, we'll authenticate with Disqus which is built on top of Django. Let's inspect the parameters that get sent to the login endpoint.

The query parameter is next and the form data items are csrfmiddlewaretoken, username, and password.

We'll do the same. But before being able to call the login endpoint we'll need to accquire the CSRF token. Let's go get it.

bot := djangobot.With("https://disqus.com/profile/login/").
		 ForHost("disqus.com").
		 SetUsername("<<username>>").
		 SetPassword("<<password>>").
         	 LoadCookies()

if bot.Error != nil {
	panic(bot.Error)
}

Next, let's authenticate with the server. Django expects the csrf token to be sent as the csrfmiddlewaretoken form data. Set() sets the query parameters and X() sets the form data.

client, err := bot.Set("next", "https://disqus.com/").
		   X("csrfmiddlewaretoken", bot.Cookie("csrftoken").Value).
		   X("username", bot.Username).
		   X("password", bot.Password).
		   Login()

if err != nil {
	panic(err)
}

sessionid := bot.Cookie("sessionid").Value
if sessionid == "" {
    panic("Authentication failed.")
}

Successful authentication creates the sessionid cookie and returns an http client object.

From this point on, the HTTP client can be used to make requests. It's important to note that all subsequent requests should have at least these headers: User-Agent, Referrer, X-CSRFToken, and X-Requested-With.

The bot.Requester() method is available to prepare requests with pre-filled headers. Example below.

Changing your Discus account password

Let's put this library to use by changing our account's password.

data := map[string]string{
	"email":        "<<your email address>>",
	"old_password": "<<your old password>>",
	"password":     "<<new password>>",
	"username":     "<<username>>",
}

_, body, _ := bot.Requester("PUT", "https://disqus.com/users/self/account/").
	      Client.
	      Send(data).
              End()

fmt.Println(body)

Please refer to the test file for more details.