Handling ERDDAP endpoints with authentication

[rsignell-usgs]

I'd like to use erddapy with an ERDDAP endpoint that is protected with basic authentication (username/password): https://cgoms.coas.oregonstate.edu/erddap

If we were just using requests, we could use this, right?
http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/user/authentication/

But is that right approach here?

Or should I just give up on expecting we could access protected endpoints with erddapy?

[ocefpaf]

Or should I just give up on expecting we could access protected endpoints with erddapy?

It is possible. requests will be a required dependency on the next version anyway, so that is not an issue.

The only issue here is developer time 😉

[rsignell-usgs]

I can verify that I'm able to access the protected ERDDAP endpoint http://cgoms.coas.oregonstate.edu/erddap by using requests with a ~/.netrc file that looks like:

machine cgoms.coas.oregonstate.edu
login <myusername>
password <mypassword>

[rsignell-usgs]

@ocefpaf, there is a unmerged PR to pandas to provide authentication:
pandas-dev/pandas#17087
looks like they are close though!

[ocefpaf]

@rsignell-usgs after thinking about this for a while we should outsource that to the data reader libraries, like pandas, xarray, etc. It seems that pandas is close to support it, if not I'll try to review that PR.

Closing this but if you disagree feel free to re-open it.

[rsignell]

@ocefpaf , looks like pandas-dev/pandas#17087 was closed but the auth was never implemented. What should we do? I have another ERDDAP endpoint that uses auth that I'd like to access with erddapy.

[ocefpaf]

@ocefpaf , looks like pandas-dev/pandas#17087 was closed but the auth was never implemented.

pandas-dev/pandas#28874 and pandas-dev/pandas#21504 were also closed. Both the original submitter and I gave up on it.

What should we do? I have another ERDDAP endpoint that uses auth that I'd like to access with erddapy.

I don't know if this still works, but in theory you can pass your user and password via environment variables and erddapy will pass them to requests.

e.requests_kwargs.update(
    {"user": os.environ["user"], "password": os.environ["password"]}
)

[ocefpaf]

Re-opening this one and xref with #331 so we can keep track of all possible ways to login in an ERDDAP server.