Accessing password-protected pages

Sometimes a web page is not open to the public but protected in some way. The simplest aspect of protection is to use basic HTTP authentication, which is integrated into virtually every web server and implements a user/password schema.

Getting ready

We can test this kind of authentication in https://httpbin.org.

It has a path, /basic-auth/{user}/{password}, which forces authentication, with the user and password stated. This is very handy for understanding how authentication works.

How to do it...

1. Import requests:

   >>> import requests
   

2. Make a GET request to the URL with the wrong credentials. Notice that we set the credentials on the URL to be user and psswd:

   >>> requests.get('https://httpbin.org/basic-auth/user/psswd',
                    auth=('user', 'psswd'))
   <Response [200]>
   

3. Use the wrong credentials to return a 401 status...