Python and mq REST api

I found cURL a good way of using the mq REST API, but I wanted to do more.  cURL depends on a package called libcurl, which can be used by other languages.

Python seemed the next obvious place to look.

As I have found out, using digital certificates for authentication is hard to set up, and using signed certificates is even harder.  As I had done the hard work of setting up the certificates before I tried curl and Python, the curl and Python experience was pretty easy.

I looked at using the Python “request” package.   This allows you to specify most of the parameters that libcurl needs, except it does not allow you to specify the password for the user’s keystore.

I then looked at the Python package pycurl package.    This is a slightly lower level API, but got it working in an hour or so.
My whole program is below.

During the testing I got various errors, such as “77”.  These are documented here. 

The messages were clear, for example

CURLE_SSL_CACERT_BADFILE (77) Problem with reading the SSL CA cert (path? access rights?).

Which was enough to tell me where to look.

All the things you can do with curl, you can do with pycurl.

# program - based on code in http://pycurl.io/docs/latest/quickstart.html
import sys
import pycurl

from io import BytesIO

# header_function take from http://pycurl.io/docs/latest/quickstart.html
headers = {}
def header_function(header_line):
# HTTP standard specifies that headers are encoded in iso-8859-1.

header_line = header_line.decode('iso-8859-1')

# Header lines include the first status line (HTTP/1.x ...).
# We are going to ignore all lines that don't have a colon in them.
# This will botch headers that are split on multiple lines...
if ':' not in header_line:
  return

# Break the header line into header name and value.
name, value = header_line.split(':', 1)
print("header",name,value)

home = "/home/colinpaice/ssl/ssl2/"
ca=home+"cacert.pem"
cert=home+"testuser.pem"
key=home+"testuser.key.pem"
cookie=home+"cookie.jar.txt"
url="https://127.0.0.1:9443/ibmmq/rest/v1/admin/qmgr/QMA/queue/CP0000?attributes=type"

buffer = BytesIO()
c = pycurl.Curl()
print("C=",c)
try:
  # see option names here https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/curl_easy_setopt.html
  # PycURL option names are derived from libcurl
  # option names by removing the CURLOPT_ prefix. 
  c.setopt(c.URL, url) 
  c.setopt(c.WRITEDATA, buffer) 
  c.setopt(pycurl.CAINFO, ca) 
  c.setopt(pycurl.CAPATH, "") 
  c.setopt(pycurl.SSLKEY, key) 
  c.setopt(pycurl.SSLCERT, cert) 
  c.setopt(pycurl.SSL_ENABLE_ALPN,1)
  c.setopt(pycurl.HTTP_VERSION,pycurl.CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_0)
  c.setopt(pycurl.COOKIE,cookie) 
  c.setopt(pycurl.COOKIEJAR,cookie) 
  c.setopt(pycurl.SSLKEYPASSWD , "password") 
  c.setopt(c.HEADERFUNCTION, header_function)  
# c.setopt(c.VERBOSE, True)
  c.perform() 
  c.close()
except Exception as e: 
  print("exception :",e ) 
finally: 
  print("done") 
body = buffer.getvalue() # Body is a byte string. 
# We have to know the encoding in order to print it to a text file 
# such as standard output. 
print(body.decode('iso-8859-1'))