Generating Tableau Trusted Tickets with curl or Python?

Question

I'm working on a portal site that will use Tableau Trusted Ticket authentication (as described here), but having some trouble generating tickets.

One thing I wanted to verify before continuing development was that the web server I'll be using has been properly white-listed for generating Trusted Ticket requests.

I've run the white-listing command as described, but my PHP developer's code keeps returning -1, indicating failure.

If all Tableau needs to generate and return a Trusted Ticket code is an HTTP POST, I figure I should be able to test this by curl. I'm a little surprised it's not suggested as a troubleshooting step, given how many web servers are Linux-based.

Does anyone know the proper way to send a test POST in order to generate a ticket, just to verify the white-listing? Since I have some little familiarity with curl and Python, I've tried those (python using the requests module) with no luck.

curl version:

curl --data "username=exampleuser" http://webserver.example.com/trusted

Python version:

import requests
url = "http://webserver.example.com/trusted"
postdata = "username=exampleuser"
r = requests.post(url, postdata)
print r.text

Both of these return a -1, which could just be that the white-listing failed somehow, or could be that these are not properly formatted requests. Has anyone tried something similar and met with success?

Conversely, does anyone have the cleartext string of what a correct POST request should look like for this?

There is a useful chunk of HTML and JavaScript over here, with which I have been able to successfully generate tickets, but since it's JavaScript-based I haven't figured a way to run it on my headless webserver or capture the request it sends for analysis.

Answer 1

So first of all, when working with verbs using curl, you have to use -X VERBNAME, e.g.,

~# curl -X POST http://httpbin.org/post
{
  "url": "http://httpbin.org/post",
  "data": "",
  "json": null,
  "args": {},
  "form": {},
  "origin": "127.0.0.1",
  "headers": {
    "User-Agent": "curl/7.19.6 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.6 OpenSSL/0.9.8n zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.5",
    "Connection": "close",
    "Accept": "*/*",
    "Content-Length": "0",
    "Host": "httpbin.org"
  },
  "files": {}
}

Second of all, with the parameter being mentioned I would try these variations:

import requests

# Variation 1
r = requests.post(url, data={'username': 'exampleuser'})

# Variation 2
r = requests.post(url, params={'username': 'exampleuser'})

# Followed by these lines
print r.status_code
print r.text

The equivalents in cURL should look something like this:

# Variation 1 equivalent
curl --data='username=exampleuser' -X POST http://httpbin.org/post

# Variation 2 equivalent
curl -X POST http://httpbin.org/post?username=exampleuser

I'm guessing by the second line that this is supposed to be an application/x-www-form-urlencoded POST request so the first variations of both should work. I'm not at all familiar with tableau though, so I can't guarantee either will work.