Sending a search query to Splunk using Python's request library - python-3.x

Question

I want to send a search query to Splunk using Python3 and the requests library and would like to receive a SID of search job. Firstly, I am able to get the session_key with:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
username = 'my_username'
password = 'my_password'
base_url = 'https://splunk-search:8089'
r = requests.get(base_url+"/servicesNS/admin/search/auth/login", data={'username':username,'password':password}, verify="/etc/pki/tls/cert.pem")
session_key = BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'lxml').find("sessionkey").text
#verify we get the session key as string
print(f"session key is {session_key} and its type is {type(session_key)}")
which makes me confident that I am authenticated. Once I have the session_key, I would like to post a search job with:
search_query = "search = search earliest=-5m index=_internal"
r = requests.post(base_url+'/services/search/jobs', data=search_query, headers = {'Authorization': 'Splunk %s' % session_key}, verify="/etc/pki/tls/cert.pem")
#view the response, I would hope to see a SID here
print(r.text)
Despite having access to the Splunk index I query, I get the following response:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>
<messages>
<msg type="WARN">call not properly authenticated</msg>
</messages>
</response>
What am I missing here? Intuition tells me it is the request.post method that is malfored but I can't see to find where the error is.

Answer 1

After more googling I found this Splunk docs:
https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/7.3.1/Security/UseAuthTokens
The call not properly authenticated response means lack of authentication. After more digging I verified that token authentication is not enabled in my cluster, hitting https://splunk-search:8089/services/authorization/tokens gives me the following response:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>
<messages>
<msg type="ERROR">Splunk token authorization is disabled.</msg>
</messages>
</response>