Seeking some guidance with net/http

[Andrew Cowan]

Heya, I am attempting to write a script that lets me login to my Youtube
account to gather frequent data for the videos I have uploaded, I am
stumbling over the Youtube login procedure which seems to involve both
cookies and session info. I am able to get this login procedure to work
with Perl and LWP::UserAgent but so far using net/http and Ruby I am
failing.

Here is the code I have been playing with which involves first a POST
form submission to youtube's /login script, then the code to follow the
redirection back to the /index page -- but looking at the contents
returned from /index it appears youtube doesn't recognize me as being
logged in:

---

# Note: I have added a bunch of puts statements to help debug, leaving
them here for this post
require 'net/http'

http = Net::HTTP.new( 'www.youtube.com', 80 )
path = '/login'
agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1)
Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1'

data =
'nexturl=/&current_form=loginForm&action_login=Log+In&username=MY_USER&password=MY_PWD'

headers = {
'Referer' => 'http://www.youtube.com/',
'Content-Type' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
'User-Agent' => agent
}

resp, data = http.post( path, data, headers )
cookie = resp.response['set-cookie']

if ( resp.code =~ /^3/ )
puts "Got Redirect: " + resp['location']
end

next_loc = resp['location']

puts 'Logging In to Set Cookies:'
puts 'Code=' + resp.code
puts 'Mesg=' + resp.message
puts 'Cookie=' + cookie
puts 'Next Location=' + next_loc
puts 'Data=' + data


headers = {
'Cookie' => cookie,
'User-Agent' => agent
}

resp, data = http.get( next_loc, headers )

puts '(should be) Logged In:'
puts 'Code=' + resp.code
puts 'Mesg=' + resp.message
puts 'Data=' + data

---

I am unsure what part I am missing which youtube apparently needs to
complete its login procedure, I would greatly appreciate any helpful
suggestions!

Thanks,
Andy

 

[Shawn Anderson]

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

You may want to check out:
http://youtube-g.rubyforge.org/

at least see how they manage the authentication aspect.

/Shawn

 

[Andrew Cowan]

Hiya Shawn, I did have a look at youtube-g, have the README file open as
I type this in fact but I don't see anything related to authenticating
an actual Youtube account, the lib is more for accessing the functions
that Youtube makes available with just guest access as far as I can
tell...

-Andy

You may want to check out:
http://youtube-g.rubyforge.org/

at least see how they manage the authentication aspect.

/Shawn

Heya, I am attempting to write a script that lets me login to my Youtube
account to gather frequent data for the videos I have uploaded, I am
stumbling over the Youtube login procedure which seems to involve both
cookies and session info. I am able to get this login procedure to work with
Perl and LWP::UserAgent but so far using net/http and Ruby I am failing.

Here is the code I have been playing with which involves first a POST form
submission to youtube's /login script, then the code to follow the
redirection back to the /index page -- but looking at the contents returned
from /index it appears youtube doesn't recognize me as being logged in:

---

# Note: I have added a bunch of puts statements to help debug, leaving
them here for this post
require 'net/http'

http = Net::HTTP.new( 'www.youtube.com', 80 )
path = '/login'
agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1)
Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1'

data =
'nexturl=/&current_form=loginForm&action_login=Log+In&username=MY_USER&password=MY_PWD'

headers = {
'Referer' => 'http://www.youtube.com/',
'Content-Type' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
'User-Agent' => agent
}

resp, data = http.post( path, data, headers )
cookie = resp.response['set-cookie']

if ( resp.code =~ /^3/ )
puts "Got Redirect: " + resp['location']
end

next_loc = resp['location']

puts 'Logging In to Set Cookies:'
puts 'Code=' + resp.code
puts 'Mesg=' + resp.message
puts 'Cookie=' + cookie
puts 'Next Location=' + next_loc
puts 'Data=' + data


headers = {
'Cookie' => cookie,
'User-Agent' => agent
}

resp, data = http.get( next_loc, headers )

puts '(should be) Logged In:'
puts 'Code=' + resp.code
puts 'Mesg=' + resp.message
puts 'Data=' + data

---

I am unsure what part I am missing which youtube apparently needs to
complete its login procedure, I would greatly appreciate any helpful
suggestions!

Thanks,
Andy

 

[7stud --]

Shawn, I had not heard of the mechanize lib, but sure enough it works
great. Thank you for posting that, much appreciated!

Thanks
-Andy

perl has mechanize too.