How to generate VSS API access token using Python

This quick how-to was written with python 3.10.8 and requests 2.28.0

PyVSS is now the supported and recommended method to interact with the VSS API.

Step-by-step guide

The following steps demonstrate how to get an access token:

  1. Import requests, sys, getpass and requests.auth.HTTPBasicAuth to handle endpoint authentication.

    import getpass import sys import requests from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth



  2. Get user from input and password via getpass.getpass() so it's not prompted.

    # input argument usr = sys.argv[1] # Prompt the user for a password without echoing. pwd = getpass.getpass()



  3. Set the authentication endpoint

    token_endpoint = 'https://vss-api.eis.utoronto.ca/auth/request-token'



  4. Make a POST request to token_request and create a new HTTPBasicAuth object initializing it with usr and pwd

  5. Get JSON response body

  6. Print Error if any or the token if succeeded:

Script

Full python script is showing below: