The recommended way is to use requests module:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import requests # $ python -m pip install requests
####from pip._vendor import requests # bundled with python
url = 'https://httpbin.org/hidden-basic-auth/user/passwd'
user, password = 'user', 'passwd'
r = requests.get(url, auth=(user, password)) # send auth unconditionally
r.raise_for_status() # raise an exception if the authentication fails
Here's a single source Python 2/3 compatible urllib2-based variant:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import base64
try:
from urllib.request import Request, urlopen
except ImportError: # Python 2
from urllib2 import Request, urlopen
credentials = '{user}:{password}'.format(**vars()).encode()
urlopen(Request(url, headers={'Authorization': # send auth unconditionally
b'Basic ' + base64.b64encode(credentials)})).close()
Python 3.5+ introduces HTTPPasswordMgrWithPriorAuth() that allows:
..to eliminate unnecessary 401 response handling, or to unconditionally send credentials on the first request in order to communicate with servers that return a 404 response instead of a 401 if the Authorization header is not sent..
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import urllib.request as urllib2
password_manager = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithPriorAuth()
password_manager.add_password(None, url, user, password,
is_authenticated=True) # to handle 404 variant
auth_manager = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_manager)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(auth_manager)
opener.open(url).close()
It is easy to replace HTTPBasicAuthHandler() with ProxyBasicAuthHandler() if necessary in this case.