Programming languages

WordPress authentication plugin setup

First, install the WordPress REST API Authentication wordpress plugin, which you can find by searching for WordPress REST API Authentication:

Then you need to open the plugin configuration page. Open Plugins in the WordPress admin panel, locate the  WordPress REST API Authentication plugin and click Configure

Select Basic Authentication:

Then click Next on the top right:

and click Finish on the next page:

Setup in Python

Assuming you have a WordPress user admin with password abc123 we can modify our code from How to get WordPress posts as JSON using Python & the WordPress REST API in order to query a non-public endpoint:

import requests
import base64

# Compute basic authentication header
auth_header = b"Basic " + base64.b64encode(b"admin:abc123")

# posts is a list of JSON objects, each representing a post
posts = requests.get("https://mydomain.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts",
                     params={"context": "edit"},
                     headers={"Authorization": auth_header}).json()

In our previous post How to get WordPress posts as JSON using Python & the WordPress REST API we showed how to fetch a single page of 10 posts using the WordPress REST API in Python.

In this post, we’ll use the pagination in order to fetch a list of all the posts.

Firstly, we observe that once we query an invalid page such as ?page=1000000, the returned JSON will be

{'code': 'rest_post_invalid_page_number',
 'message': 'The page number requested is larger than the number of pages available.',
 'data': {'status': 400}}

instead of the JSON array representing the list of posts.

Using this information, we can write a fetcher that fetches pages of 100 posts each until this error message is encountered:

from tqdm import tqdm
import requests

def page_numbers():
    """Infinite generate of page numbers"""
    num = 1
    while True:
        yield num
        num += 1

posts = []
for page in tqdm(page_numbers()):
    # Fetch the next [pagesize=10] posts
    posts_page = requests.get("https://mydomain.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts", params={"page": page, "per_page": 100}).json()
    # Check for "last page" error code
    if isinstance(posts_page, dict) and posts_page["code"] == "rest_post_invalid_page_number": # Found last page
        break
    # No error code -> add posts
    posts += posts_page

You can use the requests library to fetch the posts as JSON from /wp-json/wp/v2/posts

On the wordpress site, you typically don’t need to configure this – the JSON API is enabled by default and accessing publically available info can be done without authentication.

import requests

# posts is a list of JSON objects, each representing a post
posts = requests.get("https://mydomain.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts").json()

This will, by default, fetch the most recent 10 posts. See TODO for more info on how to fetch all posts using pagination