Accessing secured pages in Python with urllib3

In this guide, we'll show you how to access secured page (protected by basic authentication) using Python and the urllib3 library to convert them to PDF using PDFShift's API.

When you're converting a document, you might want to access a secured page (protected by basic authentication) to convert it to PDF. This can be done by setting the auth parameter to the request.

import urllib3, json, base64

# You can get an API key at https://pdfshift.io
api_key = 'sk_xxxxxxxxxxxx'

params = {
    'source': 'https://www.example.com',
    # You can set a basic authentication by passing the "auth" property which contains a username and password
    'auth': {
        'username': 'user',
        'password': 'password'
    }
}

http = urllib3.PoolManager()
response = http.request(
    'POST',
    'https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf',
    headers={
        'Content-Type': 'application/json',
        'Authorization': 'Basic {}'.format(
            base64.b64encode('api:{}'.format(api_key).encode('utf-8')).decode('utf-8')
        )
    },
    body=json.dumps(params).encode('utf-8')
)

if response.status != 200:
    raise ValueError(f"Request failed with status code {response.status}: {response.data.decode('utf-8')}")

with open('result.pdf', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(response.data)

print('The PDF document was generated and saved to result.pdf')

This allows you to protect your documents from any visitors while allowing PDFShift to access the page and convert it to PDF.

For further details on the auth property and its usage, please refer to our dedicated documentation.

We hope this guide was helpful. If you have any questions or noticed any issues on the code above,
feel free to drop us a line.