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I set up a nextcloud instance and I would like to download files from there using a python script. My nextcloud instance enforces 2-factor authentication for all users and I want it to remain that way.

My dream scenario would be to use the requests library, so following the docs here https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/15/developer_manual/client_apis/WebDAV/basic.html , I tried to do something like this: 

from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth

r = requests.request(
    method='get',
    url='https://mycloudinstance/index.php/apps/files/?dir=/Test&fileid=431',
    auth=('username', 'pass')
)
print(r.status_code)
print(r.text)

That gives me an 401 error saying {"message":"Current user is not logged in"}.

When I change the above URL to https://remote.php/dav/myinstance/index.php/apps/files/?dir=/Test&fileid=431 I get

ConnectionError(': Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno 8] nodename nor servname provided, or not known'))

As an alternative I was trying to use trying to use this library https://github.com/owncloud/pyocclient just to see if I can create a testfolder with it (it is from owncloud but should work with nextcloud too): 

import owncloud
oc = owncloud.Client('https://mycloudinstance')
oc.login('username', 'pass')
oc.mkdir('cooldir')

This throws me an owncloud.owncloud.HTTPResponseError: HTTP error: 401 error. I think that might either be because I just use it incorrectly or because of 2-factor auth.

I am not sure how to use the webdav protocol combined with the python requests library and also I am not sure how to get two-factor authorization to work with it. Has anyone ever done this?

Help is very much appreciated, thanks so much in advance.

Micromegas
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1 Answers1

3

You can bypass the 2-factor authentication by generating a secure password for a single application.

In next cloud, go to: Settings -> Personal -> Security -> Create New App Password

The password will be shown to you once (and only once), use it in place of your normal password in your script.

lsterzinger
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    @Isterzinger This is great, thank you so much! It gets me around the login error. Now the problem I have is that when I try to write the response to a textfile with it only gives me back html code and not the actual content of the file: ``with open("nextcloudfile.txt", 'wb') as file: file.write(response.content)`` – Micromegas Mar 30 '20 at 18:58
  • Would you happen to know why that is? – Micromegas Mar 30 '20 at 18:59
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    You need to use the WebDAV api I beleive. Instead of passing your requests to `example.con/index.php/file.txt`, do `example.com/remote.php/webdav/file.txt`. Otherwise you'll just be getting the HTML response from the webserver – lsterzinger Mar 30 '20 at 19:10
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    You were absolutely right! In my specific case it was ``https://mynextcloudinstanceurl/remote.php/dav/files/my_user_name/mydirectory/myfile.pdf`` . Thank you very much, big help!! – Micromegas Mar 30 '20 at 19:36