Setting custom headers on a python-wordpress-xmlrpc request
Question: I'm trying to connect to a Wordpress blog using XMLRPC. I'm using the latest
library, v2.3 (<http://python-wordpress-xmlrpc.readthedocs.org/en/latest/>).

I get the following exception when I try to initialize the client:

    
    
    ServerConnectionError: <ProtocolError for www.myblogaddress.com/xmlrpc.php: 403 Forbidden>
    

I noticed that this happens before the username & password are checked, so it
doesn't have anything to do with invalid credentials. I believe it might
require some custom headers, like user agent, but I don't know how to set a
custom transport param.

I have copied the code from the python-wordpress-xmlrpc library and modified
it so I could make tests. Here is what I have so far:

    
    
    from xmlrpclib import Transport
    
    class SpecialTransport(Transport):
    
        def send_content(self, connection, request_body):
    
            connection.putheader("Content-Type", "text/xml")
            connection.putheader("Content-Length", str(len(request_body)))
            connection.putheader('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.64 Safari/537.11')
    
            connection.putheader('Accept','text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8')
            connection.putheader('Accept-Charset','ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3')
            connection.putheader('Accept-Encoding','none')
            connection.putheader('Accept-Language', 'en-US,en;q=0.8')
            connection.putheader('Connection', 'keep-alive')
    
            connection.endheaders()
            if request_body:
                connection.send(request_body)
    
    url = "{test_url_here}"
    
    try:
        server = xmlrpc_client.ServerProxy(url, allow_none=True, transport=SpecialTransport())
        supported_methods = server.mt.supportedMethods()
    
    except xmlrpc_client.ProtocolError as err:
    
        print "A protocol error occurred"
        print "URL: %s" % err.url
        print "HTTP/HTTPS headers: %s" % err.headers
        print "Error code: %d" % err.errcode
        print "Error message: %s" % err.errmsg
    

I should mention I have successfully connected to the same blog from a PHP
script, so I believe it has something to do with the Python request. Any idea
why this doesn't work?

Thanks for the help!


Answer: I figured that the "403 Forbidden" status was because the XMLRPC api didn't
"like" the user agent. Like I said, the same request was working fine using a
PHP script.

In the [xmlrpclib Transport
class](http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Lib/xmlrpclib.py), the user
agent is set as:

    
    
    user_agent = "xmlrpclib.py/%s (by www.pythonware.com)" % __version__
    

My send_content() method was not overwriting it, instead my request ended up
with 2 User-Agent headers. Maybe someone can shed some light on what this
happens.

So, I did the following:

    
    
    from xmlrpclib import Transport
    
    class SpecialTransport(Transport):
    
        user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.43 Safari/537.31'
    
    try:
        # Use the verbose flag for debugging
        server = xmlrpc_client.ServerProxy(url, transport=SpecialTransport(), verbose=True)
    
    except xmlrpc_client.ProtocolError as err:
        print "A protocol error occurred"
        print "URL: %s" % err.url
        print "HTTP/HTTPS headers: %s" % err.headers
        print "Error code: %d" % err.errcode
        print "Error message: %s" % err.errmsg
    

It worked just fine after that.

After debugging the xmlrpclib problem, my code ended up as:

    
    
    from xmlrpclib import Transport
    import wordpress_xmlrpc
    
    class SpecialTransport(Transport):
    
        user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.43 Safari/537.31'
    
    wordpress_client = wordpress_xmlrpc.Client(
                'http://www.myblogaddress.com/xmlrpc.php',
                'username',
                'password',
                transport=SpecialTransport()
            )
    

