Connecting to your site

Begin by importing the Site class:

>>> from mwclient import Site

Then try to connect to a site:

>>> site = mwclient.Site('test.wikipedia.org')

By default, mwclient will connect using https. If your site doesn’t support https, you need to explicitly request http like so:

>>> site = mwclient.Site(('http', 'test.wikipedia.org'))

The API endpoint location

The API endpoint location on a MediaWiki site depends on the configurable $wgScriptPath. Mwclient defaults to the script path ‘/w/’ used by the Wikimedia wikis. If you get a 404 Not Found or a mwclient.errors.InvalidResponse error upon connecting, your site might use a different script path. You can specify it using the path argument:

>>> site = mwclient.Site('my-awesome-wiki.org', path='/wiki/', )

Specifying a user agent

If you are connecting to a Wikimedia site, you should follow the Wikimedia User-Agent policy and identify your tool like so:

>>> ua = 'MyCoolTool/0.2 run by User:Xyz'
>>> site = mwclient.Site('test.wikipedia.org', clients_useragent=ua)

Note that Mwclient appends ‘ - MwClient/{version} ({url})’ to your string.

Errors and warnings

Deprecations and other warnings from the API are logged using the standard Python logging facility, so you can handle them in any way you like. To print them to stdout:

>>> import logging
>>> logging.basicConfig(level=logging.WARNING)

Errors are thrown as exceptions. All exceptions inherit mwclient.errors.MwClientError.

Authenticating

Mwclient supports several methods for authentication described below. By default it will also protect you from editing when not authenticated by raising a mwclient.errors.LoginError. If you actually do want to edit unauthenticated, just set

>>> site.force_login = False

OAuth

On Wikimedia wikis, the recommended authentication method is to authenticate as a owner-only consumer. Once you have obtained the consumer token (also called consumer key), the consumer secret, the access token and the access secret, you can authenticate like so:

>>> site = mwclient.Site('test.wikipedia.org',
                         consumer_token='my_consumer_token',
                         consumer_secret='my_consumer_secret',
                         access_token='my_access_token',
                         access_secret='my_access_secret')

Old-school login

To use old-school login, call the login method:

>>> site.login('my_username', 'my_password')

If login fails, a mwclient.errors.LoginError will be thrown.

HTTP authentication

If your server is configured to use HTTP authentication, you can authenticate using the httpauth parameter. For Basic HTTP authentication:

>>> site = mwclient.Site('awesome.site', httpauth=('my_username', 'my_password'))

You can also pass in any other authentication mechanism based on the requests.auth.AuthBase, such as Digest authentication:

>>> from requests.auth import HTTPDigestAuth
>>> site = mwclient.Site('awesome.site', httpauth=HTTPDigestAuth('my_username', 'my_password'))

SSL client certificate authentication

If your server requires a SSL client certificate to authenticate, you can pass the client_certificate parameter:

>>> site = mwclient.Site('awesome.site', client_certificate='/path/to/client-and-key.pem')

This parameter being a proxy to requestscert parameter, you can also specify a tuple (certificate, key) like:

>>> site = mwclient.Site('awesome.site', client_certificate=('client.pem', 'key.pem'))

Please note that the private key must not be encrypted.