[Melbourne-pm] LWP and Digest authentication

[Craig Sanders]

On Fri, Nov 17, 2006 at 10:09:13AM +1100, Guy Morton wrote:
> Anyone know of a good tutorial for this? I'm not having much luck so  
> far.

see the lwptut man page for more details, but in summary it is like this:

         use LWP;
         my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;

         $browser->credentials(
           'servername:portnumber',
           'realm-name',
          'username' => 'password'
         );

this should work for Basic and Digest auth.

(note that lwptut also mentions that neither authentication nor cookies
are available for LWP::Simple).


see also LWP::UserAgent which mentions this:

    $ua->credentials( $netloc, $realm, $uname, $pass )

        Set the user name and password to be used for a realm.  It is
        often more useful to specialize the get_basic_creden- tials()
        method instead.


(it's interesting that the username and password pair are a hash in the
lwptut example, and just members of a list in the man page. dunno which
is right, or if both are right)

and this:

    $ua->get_basic_credentials( $realm, $uri, $isproxy )

        This is called by request() to retrieve credentials for
        documents by Basic or Digest Authentication.  The arguments
        passed in is the $realm provided by the server, the $uri and a
        boolean flag to indicate if this is authentication against a
        proxy server.

        The method should return a username and password.  It should
        return empty list to abort the authentication resolu- tion
        attempt.  Subclasses can override this method to prompt the
        for the information. An example of this can be found in
        "lwp-request" program distributed with this library.

        The base implementation simply checks a set of pre-stored
        member, set up with the credentials() method.


hope that helps.


craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>           (part time cyborg)