linkedin-api 0.2.0

Python wrapper for the Linkedin API

linkedin_api

👨‍💼 Python Wrapper for the Linkedin API

No "official" API access required - just use a valid Linkedin account!

Programmatically send messages, perform searchs, get profile data and more, all with only your Linkedin account!

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK 😉

This project should only be used as a learning project. Using it would violate Linkedin's Terms of Use. I am not responsible for your account being blocked (which they will definitely do. Hint: don't use your personal Linkedin account)

Overview

This project attempts to provide a simple Python interface for the Linkedin API.

Do you mean the legit Linkedin API?

NO! To retrieve structured data, the Linkedin Website uses a service they call Voyager. Voyager endpoints give us access to pretty much everything we could want from Linkedin: profiles, companies, connections, messages, etc.

So specifically, this project aims to provide complete coverage for Voyager.

How do we do it?

Want to contribute?

How do I find endpoints?

Installation

$ pip install linkedin-api

Example usage

from linkedin_api import Linkedin

# Authenticate using any Linkedin account credentials
api = Linkedin('[e-mail]', 'iheartmicrosoft')

# GET a profile
profile = api.get_profile('billy-g')

# GET a profiles contact info
contact_info = api.get_profile_contact_info('billy-g')

# GET all connected profiles (1st, 2nd and 3rd degree) of a given profile
connections = api.get_profile_connections('1234asc12304', max_connections=200)

Documentation

For a complete reference documentation, see the DOCS.md

Setup

Dependencies

• Python 3
• A valid Linkedin user account (don't use your personal account, if possible)
• Pipenv (optional)

1. Using pipenv...

   $ pipenv install
   $ pipenv shell
   

Troubleshooting

> I can't authenticate - I keep getting a CHALLENGE!?!

Linkedin will throw you a curve ball in the form of a challenge URL. We currently don't handle this, and so you're kinda screwed. We think it could be only IP-based (i.e. logging in from different location). Your best chance at resolution is to log out and log back in on your browser.

In-depth overview

Voyager endpoints look like this:

https://www.linkedin.com/voyager/api/identity/profileView/tom-quirk

Or, more clearly

 ___________________________________ _______________________________
|             base path             |            resource           |
https://www.linkedin.com/voyager/api /identity/profileView/tom-quirk

They are authenticated with a simple cookie, which we send with every request, along with a bunch of headers.

To get a cookie, we POST a given username and password (of a valid Linkedin user account) to https://www.linkedin.com/uas/authenticate.

To find endpoints...

We're looking at the Linkedin website and we spot some data we want. What now?

The most reliable method to find the relevant endpoint is to:

1. view source
2. command-f/search the page for some keyword in the data. This will exist inside of a <code> tag.
3. Scroll down to the next adjacent element which will be another <code> tag, probably with an id that looks something like

   <code style="display: none" id="datalet-bpr-guid-3900675">
     {"request":"/voyager/api/identity/profiles/tom-quirk/profileView","status":200,"body":"bpr-guid-3900675"}
   </code>
   

4. The value of request is the url! :woot:

You can also use the network tab in you browsers developer tools, but you will encounter mixed results.

How Clients query Voyager

Linkedin seems to have developed an internal query language/syntax where Clients (i.e. front-ends like linkedin.com) to specify what data they want (similar to the GraphQL concept). If anyone knows what this is, I'd love to know!.

Here's an example of making a request for an organisation's name and groups (the Linkedin groups it manages):

/voyager/api/organization/companies?decoration=(name,groups*~(entityUrn,largeLogo,groupName,memberCount,websiteUrl,url))&q=universalName&universalName=linkedin

The "querying" happens in the decoration parameter, which looks like

(
    name,
    groups*~(entityUrn,largeLogo,groupName,memberCount,websiteUrl,url)
)

So here, we request an organisation name, and a list of groups, where for each group we want largeLogo, groupName, etc.

Different endpoints use different parameters (and perhaps even different syntaxes) to specify these queries. Notice that the above query had a parameter q whose value was universalName; the query was then specified with the decoration parameter.

In contrast, the /search/cluster endpoint uses q=guided, and specifies its query with the guided parameter, whose value is something like

List(v->PEOPLE)

It could be possible to document (and implement a nice interface for) this query language - as we add more endpoints to this project, I'm sure it will become more clear if such a thing would be possible (and if it's worth it).