Python requests. 403 Forbidden

I needed to parse a site, but i got an error 403 Forbidden. Here is a code:

url = 'http://worldagnetwork.com/'
result = requests.get(url)
print(result.content.decode())

Its output:

<html>
<head><title>403 Forbidden</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>403 Forbidden</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx</center>
</body>
</html>

Please, say what the problem is.


Solution 1:

It seems the page rejects GET requests that do not identify a User-Agent. I visited the page with a browser (Chrome) and copied the User-Agent header of the GET request (look in the Network tab of the developer tools):

import requests
url = 'http://worldagnetwork.com/'
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36'}
result = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
print(result.content.decode())

# <!doctype html>
# <!--[if lt IE 7 ]><html class="no-js ie ie6" lang="en"> <![endif]-->
# <!--[if IE 7 ]><html class="no-js ie ie7" lang="en"> <![endif]-->
# <!--[if IE 8 ]><html class="no-js ie ie8" lang="en"> <![endif]-->
# <!--[if (gte IE 9)|!(IE)]><!--><html class="no-js" lang="en"> <!--<![endif]-->
# ...

Solution 2:

Just add to Alberto's answer:

If you still get a 403 Forbidden after adding a user-agent, you may need to add more headers, such as referer:

headers = {
    'User-Agent': '...',
    'referer': 'https://...'
}

The headers can be found in the Network > Headers > Request Headers of the Developer Tools. (Press F12 to toggle it.)

Solution 3:

If You are the server's owner/admin, and the accepted solution didn't work for You, then try disabling CSRF protection (link to an SO answer).

I am using Spring (Java), so the setup requires You to make a SecurityConfig.java file containing:

@Configuration
@EnableWebSecurity
public class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
    @Override
    protected void configure (HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http.csrf().disable();
    }
    // ...
}