connecting.rst

Connecting to your site

To connect to a MediaWiki site, you need to create a :class:`~mwclient.client.Site` object and pass it the hostname of the site you want to connect to. The hostname should not include the protocol (http or https) or the path to the API endpoint (see :ref:`endpoint`).

from mwclient import Site

user_agent = 'MyCoolTool/0.2 (xyz@example.org)'
site = Site('en.wikipedia.org', clients_useragent=user_agent)

Warning

The clients_useragent parameter, while optional, is highly recommended and may be required by some sites, such as the Wikimedia wikis (e.g. Wikipedia). Requests without a user agent may be rejected or rate-limited by the site. See :ref:`user-agent` for more information.

By default, mwclient will connect using https. If your site doesn't support https, you need to explicitly request http like so:

>>> site = Site('test.wikipedia.org', scheme='http')

The API endpoint location

The API endpoint location on a MediaWiki site depends on the configurable $wgScriptPath. Mwclient defaults to the script path '/w/' used by the Wikimedia wikis. If you get a 404 Not Found or a :class:`mwclient.errors.InvalidResponse` error upon connecting, your site might use a different script path. You can specify it using the path argument:

>>> site = Site('my-awesome-wiki.org', path='/wiki/')

Specifying a user agent

If you are connecting to a Wikimedia site, you should follow the Wikimedia User-Agent policy. The user agent should contain the tool name, the tool version and a way to contact you:

>>> user_agent = 'MyCoolTool/0.2 (xyz@example.org)'
>>> site = Site('test.wikipedia.org', clients_useragent=user_agent)

It should follow the pattern {tool_name}/{tool_version} ({contact}). The contact info can also be your user name and the tool version may be omitted: RudolphBot (User:Santa Claus).

Note that MwClient appends its own user agent to the end of your string. The final user agent will look like this:

>>> site.clients_useragent
'MyCoolTool/0.2 (xyz@example.org) mwclient/0.8.0'

Using a proxy

If you need to use a proxy, you can configure the :class:`requests.Session` using the connection_options parameter of the :class:`~mwclient.client.Site`.

import mwclient

proxies = {
  'http': 'http://10.10.1.10:3128',
  'https': 'http://10.10.1.10:1080',
}
site = mwclient.Site('en.wikipedia.org', connection_options={"proxy": proxies})

Errors and warnings

Deprecations and other warnings from the API are logged using the standard Python logging facility, so you can handle them in any way you like. To print them to stdout:

>>> import logging
>>> logging.basicConfig(level=logging.WARNING)

Errors are thrown as exceptions. All exceptions inherit :class:`mwclient.errors.MwClientError`.

Authenticating

Mwclient supports several methods for authentication described below. By default it will also protect you from editing when not authenticated by raising a :class:`mwclient.errors.LoginError`. If you actually do want to edit unauthenticated, just set

>>> site.force_login = False

OAuth Authentication

On Wikimedia wikis, the recommended authentication method is to authenticate as a owner-only consumer. Once you have obtained the consumer token (also called consumer key), the consumer secret, the access token and the access secret, you can authenticate like so:

>>> site = Site('test.wikipedia.org',
                consumer_token='my_consumer_token',
                consumer_secret='my_consumer_secret',
                access_token='my_access_token',
                access_secret='my_access_secret')

Clientlogin authentication

The :meth:`~mwclient.client.Site.clientlogin` method supports authentication using the clientlogin API, currently recommended by upstream for non-oauth authentication.

For simple username-password authentication, you can do:

>>> site.clientlogin(username='myusername', password='secret')

However, clientlogin can be called with arbitrary kwargs which are passed through, potentially enabling many different authentication processes, depending on server configuration.

clientlogin will retrieve and add the logintoken kwarg automatically, and add a loginreturnurl kwarg if neither it nor logincontinue is set.

It returns True if login immediately succeeds, and raises an error if it fails. Otherwise it returns the response from the server for your application to parse. You will need to do something appropriate with the response and then call clientlogin again with updated arguments. Please see the upstream documentation for more details.

Legacy Username-Password Authentication

Warning

Username-Password authentication is not recommended for Wikimedia wikis. See :ref:`oauth` for the recommended authentication method.

To use the legacy login interface, call :meth:`~mwclient.client.Site.login` with your username and password. If login fails, a :class:`mwclient.errors.LoginError` will be raised.

>>> site.login('my_username', 'my_password')

For sites that use "bot passwords", you can use this method to login with a bot password. From mediawiki 1.27 onwards, logging in this way with an account's main password is deprecated, and may stop working at some point. It is recommended to use :ref:`oauth`, :ref:`clientlogin`, or a bot password instead.

HTTP authentication

Warning

HTTP authentication does not replace MediaWiki's built-in authentication system. It is used to protect access to the API, not to authenticate users.

If your server is configured to use HTTP authentication, you can authenticate using the httpauth parameter. This parameter is a proxy to the auth parameter of :class:`requests.Session` and can be set to any class that extends :class:`requests.auth.AuthBase`. For example, to use basic authentication:

>>> from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth
>>> site = Site('awesome.site', httpauth=HTTPBasicAuth('my_username', 'my_password'))

SSL client certificate authentication

If your server requires an SSL client certificate to authenticate, you can pass the client_certificate parameter:

>>> site = Site('awesome.site', client_certificate='/path/to/client-and-key.pem')

This parameter being a proxy to :class:`requests`' cert parameter, you can also specify a tuple (certificate, key) like:

>>> site = Site('awesome.site', client_certificate=('client.pem', 'key.pem'))

Please note that the private key must not be encrypted.

Logging out

There is no logout method because merely exiting the script deletes all cookies, achieving the same effect.