iguanodon has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I recently read the perl.com article on WWW::Mechanize and it seems pretty cool. But I haven't been able to use it against pages that require basic authentication. I tried grabbing the HTTP::Request object returned by the req() method and calling authorization_basic() on it: 
 
my $agent = WWW::Mechanize->new();
$agent->get("http://my.server.com/");
my $req = $agent->req();
$req->authorization_basic($user, $pass);
$agent->follow("Some Link");
 
print $agent->content();

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But I just get a 401 error. $user and $pass are correct, I'm logging in successfully in another script that uses 'regular' LWP.

The docs for WWW::Mechanize don't mention anything about authentication, has anyone done this?

iguanodon

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Re: WWW::Mechanize and basic authentication
by adrianh (Chancellor) on Jan 29, 2003 at 13:12 UTC

    WWW::Mechanize is a subclass of LWP::UserAgent - so can use all of its methods.

    You want to do something like:

    my $agent = WWW::Mechanize->new();
$agent->credentials($uri->host_port, "TheRealm", "user", "pass");

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    See LWP::UserAgent for details on credentials.

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      That works, thanks a bunch.

      I need to understand how the credentials method of LWP::UserAgent differs from the authorization_basic method of HTTP::Request. I'm guessing that under the hood they're doing the same thing, so was my code not working because I'm passing the credentials too late in the process?

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        It doesn't work because the get and follow methods create a new HTTP::Request object every time.

        req returns the HTTP::Request that was used in the last request, not the one that will be used in the next - so yes, a little late in the process :-)

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