login to mediawiki using RCurl

Question

how can I login to a mediawiki with RCurl (or Curl, and I can adapt it to the R package)?

I just want to parse a page but I need to login otherwise I can't access it.

Answer 1

The Mediawiki API has a login function which returns cookies and a token. You have to save and send both back to the API in order to authenticate the session and login. Here's a way to do it with curl and XMLstarlet in bash:

Send a request for a login token, saving the cookies in cookies.txt and the output in output.xml.

curl -c cookies.txt -d "lgname=YOURNAME&lgpassword=YOURPASS&action=login&format=xml" http://your.mediawikiinstall.com/w/api.php -o output.xml

Then pull the token out of the xml using XMLstarlet, and save that as a bash variable.

YOURTOKEN=$(xml sel -t -m '//login' -v '//@token' output.xml)

Then send the login request, including the cookie file and the token.

curl -b cookies.txt -d "action=login&lgname=YOURNAME&lgpassword=YOURPASS&format=xml&lgtoken="$YOURTOKEN http://your.mediawikiinstall.com/w/api.php