Python requests returning 500 error despite copying HTTP headers

Question

A code of mine is now throwing 500 errors (where it didn't before) at a step where I am required to communicate with the following website: http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in/mp3/application.php

I am receiving 500 errors when making GET or POST requests, however it works fine in the browser which tells me there's an error with the HTTP headers. When I replicate the headers I see on Chrome as follows, I still get the errors:

payload = {"program": "metabin", "method": "blast", "filetype": "blastresult", "samplefile": "blast", "bitscore": "-0.2", "binsize": "30", "email": "", "submit": "Submit"}
headers = {"Origin": "http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in", "Referer": "http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in/mp3/application.php", "Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": "1", "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.181 Safari/537.36", "X-DevTools-Emulate-Network-Conditions-Client-Id": "A6A0EFE8F8ECE2562D4EDF2B00589DC1"}
requests.post("http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in/mp3/submitjob.php", files=payload, headers=headers)

Am I incorrectly copying the HTTP headers? Or is there another step I am missing?

Thanks, Josh.

Answer 1

payload = {"program": "metabin",
           "method": "blast",
           "filetype": "blastresult",
           "samplefile": "blast",
           "bitscore": "-0.2",
           "binsize": "30",
           "email": "",
           "submit": "Submit"}

headers = {"Origin": "http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in",
           "Referer": "http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in/mp3/application.php",
           "Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": "1",
           "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.181 Safari/537.36",
           "X-DevTools-Emulate-Network-Conditions-Client-Id": "A6A0EFE8F8ECE2562D4EDF2B00589DC1"}

requests.post("http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in/mp3/submitjob.php", data=payload, headers=headers)

But I still don't see the "file", as you don't open it binary, to send a file through request post method to a server you should make something similar (these will be just example params!)

data = {'csrf-token' : '214214cqwt21',
        'title'      :  'Blue sky'}
files = {'file-data' : open("mypicture.jpg", "rb")}

session.post("http://targeturl.com", data = data, files = files)