Python wrapper for the Linkedin API
Project description
linkedin_api
👨💼 Python Wrapper for the Linkedin API
No "official" API access required - just use a valid Linkedin account!
Programmatically send messages, perform searches, get profile data and more, all with a regular Linkedin user account!
USE AT YOUR OWN RISK 😉
This project should only be used as a learning project. Using it would violate Linkedin's User Agreement. I am not responsible for your account being blocked (which they will definitely do - see User Agreement section 8.2). Hint: don't use a Linkedin account that you care about)
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. - anything that you can see on linkedin.com, we can get from Voyager.
So specifically, this project aims to provide complete coverage for Voyager.
Want to contribute?
Installation
$ pip install linkedin-api
Example usage
from linkedin_api import Linkedin
# Authenticate using any Linkedin account credentials
api = Linkedin('reedhoffman@linkedin.com', '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
Development Setup
Dependencies
- Python 3.7
- A valid Linkedin user account (don't use your personal account, if possible)
- Pipenv (optional)
Installation
-
Create a
.env
config file. An example is provided in.env.example
- you include at least all of the settings set there. -
Using pipenv...
$ pipenv install $ pipenv shell
Running tests
$ python -m pytest tests
Troubleshooting
> 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.
Known reasons for Challenge:
- 2FA
- Rate-limit - "It looks like you’re visiting a very high number of pages on LinkedIn.". Note - n=1 experiment where this page was hit after ~900 contiguous requests in a single session (within the hour) (these included random delays between each request), as well as a bunch of testing, so who knows the actual limit.
Please add more as you come across them.
Search woes
- Mileage may vary when searching general keywords like "software" using the standard
search
method. They've recently added some smarts around search whereby they group results by people, company, jobs etc. if the query is general enough. Try to use an entity-specific search method (i.e. search_people) where possible.
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:
view source
command-f
/search the page for some keyword in the data. This will exist inside of a<code>
tag.- Scroll down to the next adjacent element which will be another
<code>
tag, probably with anid
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>
- 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).
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