What is the pythonic way of generating an oAuth token?

Question

For this example I will use shipstation's api, but this question applies to any api using oAuth tokens.

The ShipStation API uses Basic HTTP authentication. The Authorization header is constructed as follows:

Username (API_KEY) and password (API_SECRET) are combined into a string "username:password"

The resulting string is then encoded using the RFC2045-MIME variant of Base64, except not limited to 76 char/line

The authorization method and a space i.e. "Basic " is then put before the encoded string.

For example, if the API_KEY given is 'ShipStation' and the API_SECRET is 'Rocks' then the header is formed as follows:

Authorization: Basic U2hpcFN0YXRpb246Um9ja3M=

Easy right? My first attempt:

import base64
KEY = 'ShipStation'
SECRET = 'Rocks'

AUTH = bytes(str(KEY) + ':' + str(SECRET), encoding='utf-8')
TOKEN = base64.b64encode(AUTH)

AUTH_TOKEN = 'Basic ' + str(TOKEN)
print(AUTH_TOKEN) # Basic b'U2hpcFN0YXRpb246Um9ja3M='

As you can see, the AUTH_TOKEN I made has an additional b' at the beginning and ' at the end, which causes a 401 when you send the request.

Here is my fix to this:

import base64
KEY = 'ShipStation'
SECRET = 'Rocks'

AUTH = bytes(str(KEY) + ':' + str(SECRET), encoding='utf-8')
TOKEN = str(base64.b64encode(AUTH))

AUTH_TOKEN = 'Basic ' + TOKEN[2:len(TOKEN)-1]
print(AUTH_TOKEN) # Basic U2hpcFN0YXRpb246Um9ja3M=

While the above code works, this is clearly not the way it was intended to be done. (I assume?)

TLDR;

What is the pythonic way of turning the TOKEN in the example above into the proper format?

What is the pythonic way of generating an oAuth token?

TLDR;

0 Answers0