Trouble with simple https authentication with urllib2 (to get PayPal OAUTH bearer token)

Question

I'm at the first stage of integrating our web app with PayPal's express checkout api. For me to place a purchase, I have to get a Bearer token of course using our client id and our client secret.

I use the following curl command to successfully get that token:

curl https://api.sandbox.paypal.com/v1/oauth2/token \
-H "Accept: application/json" \
-H "Accept-Language: en_US" \
-u "ourID:ourSecret" \
-d "grant_type=client_credentials"

Now I am trying to achieve the same results in python using urllib2. I've arrived at the following code, which produces a 401 HTTP Unauthorized exception.

    import urllib
    import urllib2

    url = "https://api.sandbox.paypal.com/v1/oauth2/token"

    PAYPAL_CLIENT_ID = "ourID"
    PAYPAL_CLIENT_SECRET = "ourSecret"

    passman = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
    passman.add_password(None, url, PAYPAL_CLIENT_ID, PAYPAL_CLIENT_SECRET)
    authhandler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(passman)
    opener = urllib2.build_opener(authhandler)
    urllib2.install_opener(opener)

    req = urllib2.Request( url=url,
      headers={
            "Accept": "application/json",
            "Accept-Language": "en_US",
            },
      data =urllib.urlencode({
            "grant_type":"client_credentials",
            }),)

    result = urllib2.urlopen(req).read()
    print result

Does anyone have any idea what I'm doing wrong above? Many thanks for any insights

Finally gave in and used the sdk PayPal recommends (https://github.com/paypal/rest-api-sdk-python) to get the token... that seems to work. But would still like to know what I'm doing wrong above if anyone has a clue. Many thanks. — rgb, Aug 14 '13 at 17:41

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:14

Experiencing the same problem here. Based on Get access token from Paypal in Python - Using urllib2 or requests library working python code is:

import urllib
import urllib2
import base64
token_url = 'https://api.sandbox.paypal.com/v1/oauth2/token'
client_id = '.....'
client_secret = '....'

credentials = "%s:%s" % (client_id, client_secret)
encode_credential = base64.b64encode(credentials.encode('utf-8')).decode('utf-8').replace("\n", "")

header_params = {
    "Authorization": ("Basic %s" % encode_credential),
    "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
    "Accept": "application/json"
}
param = {
    'grant_type': 'client_credentials',
}
data = urllib.urlencode(param)

request = urllib2.Request(token_url, data, header_params)
response = urllib2.urlopen(request).open()
print response

The reason, I believe, is explained at Python urllib2 Basic Auth Problem

Python libraries, per HTTP-Standard, first send an unauthenticated request, and then only if it's answered with a 401 retry, are the correct credentials sent. If the servers don't do "totally standard authentication" then the libraries won't work.

Trouble with simple https authentication with urllib2 (to get PayPal OAUTH bearer token)

1 Answers1