helper-auth 0.3.0

Requests authentication using existing helpers

Installation

pip install helper-auth

Usage

Objects of the HelperAuth class are intended to be used as custom authentication handlers as per the Requests documentation.

Default scenario

Suppose you have an existing GitHub personal access token, and a Git credential helper already set up for Git to authenticate to GitHub using this token as the password. This helper prints the following to standard output:

$ git credential-github
username=your_github_username
password=your_github_token

You want to use the same token to make GitHub API calls in Python with the help of the Requests library. The API expects a token your_github_token string as the value of your request's Authorization header.

You can use a HelperAuth authentication handler with its default settings:

import requests
from helper_auth import HelperAuth

auth = HelperAuth("git credential-github")

response = requests.get("https://api.github.com/user/repos", auth=auth)

Specifying the helper command

Simple helper command with no command-line arguments can be a string or a path-like object.

auth = HelperAuth("helper")

auth = HelperAuth(Path("helper"))

If the helper command contains command-line arguments, it can be a string or a list of strings.

auth = HelperAuth("helper --option arg")

auth = HelperAuth(["helper", "--option", "arg"])

Caching the token

By default, a HelperAuth authentication handler never stores the value of the token (password) in its internal state. Rather, the helper command is invoked on each call to the handler. This is an intentional precaution (such that the token cannot be retrieved ex post by the introspection of the handler) but can be expensive. You can override this by passing cache_token=True to the constructor:

auth = HelperAuth("helper", cache_token=True)