Begin by importing the Site class:
>>> from mwclient import Site
Then try to connect to a site:
>>> site = Site('test.wikipedia.org')
By default, mwclient will connect using https. If your site doesn't support https, you need to explicitly request http like so:
>>> site = Site('test.wikipedia.org', scheme='http')
The API endpoint location on a MediaWiki site depends on the configurable $wgScriptPath. Mwclient defaults to the script path '/w/' used by the Wikimedia wikis. If you get a 404 Not Found or a mwclient.errors.InvalidResponse
error upon connecting, your site might use a different script path. You can specify it using the path
argument:
>>> site = Site('my-awesome-wiki.org', path='/wiki/', )
If you are connecting to a Wikimedia site, you should follow the Wikimedia User-Agent policy. The user agent should contain the tool name, the tool version and a way to contact you:
>>> ua = 'MyCoolTool/0.2 (xyz@example.org)' >>> site = Site('test.wikipedia.org', clients_useragent=ua)
It should follow the pattern {tool_name}/{tool_version} ({contact})
. The contact info can also be your user name and the tool version may be omitted: RudolphBot (User:Santa Claus)
.
Note that MwClient appends its own user agent to the end of your string.
Deprecations and other warnings from the API are logged using the standard Python logging facility, so you can handle them in any way you like. To print them to stdout:
>>> import logging >>> logging.basicConfig(level=logging.WARNING)
Errors are thrown as exceptions. All exceptions inherit mwclient.errors.MwClientError
.
Mwclient supports several methods for authentication described below. By default it will also protect you from editing when not authenticated by raising a mwclient.errors.LoginError
. If you actually do want to edit unauthenticated, just set
>>> site.force_login = False
On Wikimedia wikis, the recommended authentication method is to authenticate as a owner-only consumer. Once you have obtained the consumer token (also called consumer key), the consumer secret, the access token and the access secret, you can authenticate like so:
- >>> site = Site('test.wikipedia.org',
consumer_token='my_consumer_token', consumer_secret='my_consumer_secret', access_token='my_access_token', access_secret='my_access_secret')
To use old-school login, call the login method:
>>> site.login('my_username', 'my_password')
If login fails, a mwclient.errors.LoginError
will be thrown. See mwclient.client.Site.login
for all options.
If your server is configured to use HTTP authentication, you can authenticate using the httpauth
parameter. For Basic HTTP authentication:
>>> site = Site('awesome.site', httpauth=('my_username', 'my_password'))
You can also pass in any other authentication mechanism <requests:authentication>
based on the requests.auth.AuthBase
, such as Digest authentication:
>>> from requests.auth import HTTPDigestAuth >>> site = Site('awesome.site', httpauth=HTTPDigestAuth('my_username', 'my_password'))
If your server requires a SSL client certificate to authenticate, you can pass the client_certificate
parameter:
>>> site = Site('awesome.site', client_certificate='/path/to/client-and-key.pem')
This parameter being a proxy to requests
' cert parameter, you can also specify a tuple (certificate, key) like:
>>> site = Site('awesome.site', client_certificate=('client.pem', 'key.pem'))
Please note that the private key must not be encrypted.
There is no logout method because merely exiting the script deletes all cookies, achieving the same effect.