login to a website in python 3.6 without requests module

Question

I have been trying to login to a website using python 3.6 but it has proven to be more difficult than i originally anticipated. So far this is my code:

import urllib.request
import urllib.parse

headers = {}
headers['User-Agent'] = "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/63.0.3239.108 Safari/537.36"

url = "https://www.pinterest.co.uk/login/"

data = {
    "email" : "my@email",
    "password" : "my_password"}

data = urllib.parse.urlencode(data)
data = data.encode("utf-8")

request = urllib.request.Request(url, headers = headers, data = data)
response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
responseurl = response.geturl()

print(responseurl)

This throws up a 403 error (forbidden), and I'm not sure why as I have added my email, passcode and even changed the user agent. Am I just missing something simple like a cookiejar?

If possible is there a way to do this without using the requests module as this is a challenge that I have been given to do this with only inbuilt modules (but I am allowed to get help so I'm not cheating)

Answer 1

Most sites will use a csrf token or other means to block exactly what you are attempting to do. One possible workaround would be to utilize a browser automation framework such as selenium and log in through the site's UI