Help getting Channel to run as logged in user, rather than server admin

Dev Community Dev/API Corner
1

I’m running into an issue in getting my plugin to access the logged in user’s playlists, rather than the server admin regardless of who is logged in.

I initially was getting my token from os.environ['PLEXTOKEN'], and setting HTTP.Headers['X-Plex-Token'] to that. Understandably, this was always responding as the admin.

However, I then tried switching to user_token = Request.Headers.get('X-Plex-Token', ''). This does allow me to get the proper user’s token. I’ve verified that the token is proper by going to https://127.0.0.1:32400/playlists/?X-Plex-Token=xxx in a browser, and it returns the proper data.

So since I want to use that user_token, I was setting HTTP.Headers['X-Plex-Token'] = user_token, however I observed that the code in networking.py will override whatever you set X-Plex-Token to back to os.environ['PLEXTOKEN'] regardless of your settings (This is at lines 172-173 of networking.py).

To see if this was a bug, I hacked out that resetting, so the X-Plex-Token was still the user’s value, but when I do that, I get a HTTPError: HTTP Error 401: Unauthorized…

To try to work around this, I rammed them all together:

HTTP.Headers['X-Plex-Token'] = os.environ['PLEXTOKEN']
all_playlists_xml = XML.ElementFromURL('http://127.0.0.1:32400/playlists?X-Plex-Token=xxx') # hardcoded USER token

and lo-and-behold, it worked.

Since I’ve been told that adding ?X-Plex-Token=xxx to your URLs is bad practice, I’ve been trying to figure out how else to accomplish this. But I couldn’t find any header field that would allow me to effectively pass a 2nd token to the server (The first to be authorized by the server, the second to be the user to act as).

I did, however, try to work around the networking code overriding your set token. I modified networking.py to not override your X-Plex-Token if you have manually set it (the last “and” is the new code):

        if 'PLEXTOKEN' in os.environ and len(os.environ['PLEXTOKEN']) > 0 and self._request_headers is not None and self._url.find('http://127.0.0.1') == 0 and 'X-Plex-Token' not in self._request_headers:
		  self._request_headers['X-Plex-Token'] = os.environ['PLEXTOKEN']

This works as well, without the ?X-Plex-Token=xxx, at least for all of the URLs that I need for my plugin (which are primarily '/Playlist', '/Video', '/library/metadata/###'), but it fails for at least one URL that I found, '/myplex/account', with an HTTPError that I assume is related to the 401 I get when just trying the raw URL in a browser.

So, those are my discoveries… Now the questions:

  • Is there any header key (or other method) where I can pass the two tokens to XML.ElementFromURL()?
  • Is it wrong to add the and 'X-Plex-Token' not in self._request_headers to networking.py as an official change? (Which I guess is asking if the error from ‘/myplex/account’ is a problem with ‘/myplex/account’ rather than my change…) It seems like the code should use the headers you’ve manually set and not override them.
  • Any other suggestion for how to solve this? Thanks!
2

Hard to tell, with only snips of the code, instead of a link to the sourcecode :frowning:

But when said, take a peak here:

3

So basically, instead of

playlists = XML.ElementFromURL(url)

unwrap that code and manually do

# Darn....Hard work ahead..We have to logon as another user here :-(
myHeader = {}
myHeader['X-Plex-Token'] = users[user]['accessToken']
# TODO Change to native framework call, when Plex allows token in header
request = urllib2.Request(self.getListsURL, headers=myHeader)
playlists = XML.ElementFromString(
urllib2.urlopen(request).read())

?

I guess that would probably work!

4

Works fine for WebTools :wink:

5

@dane22 said:
Works fine for WebTools :wink:

What “works fine for WebTools”??

Edit: Oh… Duh…

6

@edank said:
What “works fine for WebTools”??

To logon as a selected user, and grab his playlists

7
8

Awesome, that does work! Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

def XMLFromURLforCurrentRequest(url):
	# TODO Change to native framework call, when Plex allows token in header...
	# Really, should just be "xml = XML.ElementFromURL(url, headers={'X-Plex-Token': Request.Headers.get('X-Plex-Token', '')})"
	# But PLEX library overrides X-Plex-Token and resets it to the Admin's token regardless.
	opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPHandler)
	request = urllib2.Request(url)
	request.add_header('X-Plex-Token', Request.Headers.get('X-Plex-Token', ''))
	response = opener.open(request).read()
	xml = XML.ElementFromString(response)
	return xml