Skip to content

2020-07-29 Api

Requesting An Oauth Token

Requesting an Oauth token for API calls#

This is specifically for the Oauth 2.0 client credentials flow and resource owner password flow

Ever tried to request an oauth token and receive this error

{'error': 'unsupported_grant_type'}

Yet you are sending password as the auth type?

response = requests.post(
    'https://{base_url}/token',
    json={'grant_type':'password', 'username': 'my_user', 'password': 'my_password'},
    headers={'Accept': 'application/json', 'Content-Type': 'application/json'},
    verify=False
)

The problem is: It is part of the oauth spec that you use application/x-www-form-urlencoded as the content type of your token request

Here is a link to a draft oauth spec

So we need change the above request:

  • from using json to application/x-www-form-urlencoded

  • use data=.. instead of json=... for the requests library

    response = requests.post( ‘https://{base_url}/token’, data={‘grant_type’:’password’, ‘username’: ‘my_user’, ‘password’: ‘my_password’}, headers={‘Accept’: ‘application/json’, ‘Content-Type’: ‘application/x-www-form-urlencoded’}, verify=False )

Sources#