Tumblr with no OAuth

TL;DR: tumblr_noauth is a Python package which provides a TumblrSession(email, password) class which extends requests.Session and provides a Tumblr login/logout process.

Tumblr supplies an OAuth API which you can use for fairly simple tasks, mostly for dashboard-like functions; there’s a lot left out, such as

• Checking if a URL is available for creating a new blog; the endpoint at www.tumblr.com/check_if_tumblelog_name_is_available requires authentication
• Probably others which I forget

With no official way to access that data, tumblr_noauth provides a workaround: emulate a whole Tumblr “session”; you feed it a username and password (which aren’t stored, even in the TumblrSession object) and it performs a login request (and a logout request with __exit__ or at the end of the with clause).

Under the hood, a TumblrSession is a requests.Session with some special behavior optimized for use with Python’s with statements.

The following methods in a TumblrSession object are specialized to make the https://www.tumblr.com/ prefix optional:

• delete
• get
• head
• options
• patch
• post
• put

i.e. the high-level HTTP requests.

Example usage:

import json
import tumblr_noauth

with open('creds.json') as f:
    creds = json.load(f)

with TumblrSession(creds['email'], creds['password']) as session:
    data = {'name': staff}
    resp = session.post('check_if_tumblelog_name_is_available',
    data=data)

    print(resp, ';', resp.text)

Where the with clause automatically logs in and out of Tumblr.

For additional “authenticity”, you might want to set your headers to something like...

# this is lying
headers = {
    'Host': 'www.tumblr.com',
    'Origin': 'https://www.tumblr.com',
    'Referer': 'https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard',
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.139 Safari/537.36',
    'X-Requested-With': 'XMLHttpRequest',
}