Understanding Bearer Authorization for web scraping using python 3.8 and requests - python-3.x

Question

So I am looking to scrape the following site:
https://hyland.csod.com/ux/ats/careersite/4/home?c=hyland
What I am running into using the Python Requests library is that the header requires I pass along an Authorization header that bears a token of some kind. While I can get this to work if I manually go to the page, copy and paste it, and then run my program, I am wondering how I could bypass this issue (After all, what is the point in running a scraper if I still have to visit the actual site manually and retrieve the authorization token).
I am newer to authorization/ bearer headers and am hoping someone might be able to clarify how the browser generates a token to retrieve this information/ how I can simulate this. Here is my code:
import requests
import json
import datetime
today = datetime.datetime.today()
url = "https://hyland.csod.com/services/x/career-site/v1/search"
# actual sitehttps://hyland.csod.com/ux/ats/careersite/4/home?c=hyland
headers = {
'authority': 'hyland.csod.com',
'origin': 'https://hyland.csod.com',
'authorization': 'Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzUxMiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCIsImNsaWQiOiI0bDhnbnFhbGk3NjgifQ.eyJzdWIiOi0xMDMsImF1ZCI6IjRxNTFzeG5oY25yazRhNXB1eXZ1eGh6eCIsImNvcnAiOiJoeWxhbmQiLCJjdWlkIjoxLCJ0emlkIjoxNCwibmJkIjoiMjAxOTEyMzEyMTE0MTU5MzQiLCJleHAiOiIyMDE5MTIzMTIyMTUxNTkzNCIsImlhdCI6IjIwMTkxMjMxMjExNDE1OTM0In0.PlNdWXtb1uNoMuGIhI093ZbheRN_DwENTlkNoVr0j7Zah6JHd5cukudVFnZEiQmgBZ_nlDU4C-9JO_2We380Vg',
'content-type': 'application/json',
'accept': 'application/json; q=1.0, text/*; q=0.8, */*; q=0.1',
'x-requested-with': 'XMLHttpRequest',
'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.88 Safari/537.36',
'csod-accept-language': 'en-US',
'referer': 'https://hyland.csod.com/ux/ats/careersite/4/home?c=hyland',
'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate, br',
'cookie': 'CYBERU_lastculture=en-US; ASP.NET_SessionId=4q51sxnhcnrk4a5puyvuxhzx; cscx=hyland^|-103^|1^|14^|KumB4VhzYXML22MnMxjtTB9SKgHiWW0tFg0HbHnOek4=; c-s=expires=1577909201~access=/clientimg/hyland/*^!/content/hyland/*~md5=78cd5252d2efff6eb77d2e6bf0ce3127',
}
data = ['{"careerSiteId":4,"pageNumber":1,"pageSize":25,"cultureId":1,"searchText":"","cultureName":"en-US","states":["oh"],"countryCodes":[],"cities":[],"placeID":"","radius":null,"postingsWithinDays":null,"customFieldCheckboxKeys":[],"customFieldDropdowns":[],"customFieldRadios":[]}',
'{"careerSiteId":4,"pageNumber":2,"pageSize":25,"cultureId":1,"searchText":"","cultureName":"en-US","states":["oh"],"countryCodes":[],"cities":[],"placeID":"","radius":null,"postingsWithinDays":null,"customFieldCheckboxKeys":[],"customFieldDropdowns":[],"customFieldRadios":[]}']
def hyland(url, data):
# for openings in data:
dirty = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=data).text
if 'Unauthorized' in dirty:
print(dirty)
print("There was an error connecting. Check Info")
# print(dirty)
clean = json.loads(dirty)
cleaner = json.dumps(clean, indent=4)
print("Openings at Hyland Software in Westlake as of {}".format(today.strftime('%m-%d-%Y')))
for i in range(0,60):
try:
print(clean["data"]["requisitions"][i]["displayJobTitle"])
print("")
print("")
except:
print("{} Openings at Hyland".format(i))
break
for datum in data:
hyland(url, data=datum)
So basically what my code is doing is sending a post request to the url above along with the headers and necessary data to retrieve what I want. This scraper works for a short period of time, but if I leave and come back after a few hours it no longer works due to authorization (at least that is what I have concluded).
Any help/ clarification on how all this works would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Your code has a few problems:
As you noted you have to get the bearer token
You have to send your requests using requests.session() (as this webpage seems to pay attention to the cookies you send)
Optional: your headers had a lot of unnecessary headers that could be removed
All in all, here bellow is the working code:
import requests
import json
import datetime
today = datetime.datetime.today()
session = requests.session()
url = "https://hyland.csod.com:443/ux/ats/careersite/4/home?c=hyland"
headers = {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0", "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8", "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.5", "Accept-Encoding": "gzip, deflate", "DNT": "1", "Connection": "close", "Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": "1"}
raw = session.get(url, headers=headers).text
token = raw[raw.index("token")+8:]
token = token[:token.index("\"")]
bearer_token = f"Bearer {token}"
url = "https://hyland.csod.com/services/x/career-site/v1/search"
# actual sitehttps://hyland.csod.com/ux/ats/careersite/4/home?c=hyland
headers = {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0", "Authorization": bearer_token}
data = ['{"careerSiteId":4,"pageNumber":1,"pageSize":25,"cultureId":1,"searchText":"","cultureName":"en-US","states":["oh"],"countryCodes":[],"cities":[],"placeID":"","radius":null,"postingsWithinDays":null,"customFieldCheckboxKeys":[],"customFieldDropdowns":[],"customFieldRadios":[]}',
'{"careerSiteId":4,"pageNumber":2,"pageSize":25,"cultureId":1,"searchText":"","cultureName":"en-US","states":["oh"],"countryCodes":[],"cities":[],"placeID":"","radius":null,"postingsWithinDays":null,"customFieldCheckboxKeys":[],"customFieldDropdowns":[],"customFieldRadios":[]}']
def hyland(url, data, session= session):
# for openings in data:
dirty = session.post(url, headers=headers, data=data).text
if 'Unauthorized' in dirty:
print(dirty)
print("There was an error connecting. Check Info")
# print(dirty)
clean = json.loads(dirty)
cleaner = json.dumps(clean, indent=4)
print("Openings at Hyland Software in Westlake as of {}".format(today.strftime('%m-%d-%Y')))
for i in range(0,60):
try:
print(clean["data"]["requisitions"][i]["displayJobTitle"])
print("")
print("")
except:
print("{} Openings at Hyland".format(i))
break
for datum in data:
hyland(url, data=datum, session = session)
hope this helps