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Python LinkedIn

Python interface to the LinkedIn API

This library provides a pure Python interface to the LinkedIn Profile, Group, Company, Jobs, Search, Share, Network and Invitation REST APIs.

LinkedIn provides a service that lets people bring their LinkedIn profiles and networks with them to your site or application via their OAuth based API. This library provides a lightweight interface over a complicated LinkedIn OAuth based API to make it for python programmers easy to use.

Installation

You can install python-linkedin library via pip:

$ pip install python-linkedin

Authentication

LinkedIn REST API uses Oauth 2.0 protocol for authentication. In order to use the LinkedIn API, you have an application key and application secret. You can get more detail from here.

For debugging purposes you can use the credentials below. It belongs to my test application. Nothing's harmful.

KEY = 'wFNJekVpDCJtRPFX812pQsJee-gt0zO4X5XmG6wcfSOSlLocxodAXNMbl0_hw3Vl'
SECRET = 'daJDa6_8UcnGMw1yuq9TjoO_PMKukXMo8vEMo7Qv5J-G3SPgrAV0FqFCd0TNjQyG'

LinkedIn redirects the user back to your website's URL after granting access (giving proper permissions) to your application. We call that url RETURN URL. Assuming your return url is http://localhost:8000, you can write something like this:

from linkedin import linkedin

API_KEY = "wFNJekVpDCJtRPFX812pQsJee-gt0zO4X5XmG6wcfSOSlLocxodAXNMbl0_hw3Vl"
API_SECRET = "daJDa6_8UcnGMw1yuq9TjoO_PMKukXMo8vEMo7Qv5J-G3SPgrAV0FqFCd0TNjQyG"
RETURN_URL = "http://localhost:8000"
# Optionally one can send custom "state" value that will be returned from OAuth server
# It can be used to track your user state or something else (it's up to you)
# Be aware that this value is sent to OAuth server AS IS - make sure to encode or hash it
#authorization.state = 'your_encoded_message'
authentication = linkedin.LinkedInAuthentication(API_KEY, API_SECRET, RETURN_URL, linkedin.PERMISSIONS.enums.values())
print authentication.authorization_url
application = linkedin.LinkedInApplication(authentication)

When you grant access to the application, you will be redirected to the return url with the following query strings appended to your RETURN_URL:

"http://localhost:8000/?code=AQTXrv3Pe1iWS0EQvLg0NJA8ju_XuiadXACqHennhWih7iRyDSzAm5jaf3R7I8&state=ea34a04b91c72863c82878d2b8f1836c"

This means that the value of the authorization_code is AQTXrv3Pe1iWS0EQvLg0NJA8ju_XuiadXACqHennhWih7iRyDSzAm5jaf3R7I8. After setting it by hand, we can call the .get_access_token() to get the actual token.

authentication.authorization_code = "AQTXrv3Pe1iWS0EQvLg0NJA8ju_XuiadXACqHennhWih7iRyDSzAm5jaf3R7I8"
authentication.get_access_token()

After you get the access token, you are now permitted to make API calls on behalf of the user who granted access to you app. In addition to that, in order to prevent from going through the OAuth flow for every consecutive request, one can directly assign the access token obtained before to the application instance.

application = linkedin.LinkedInApplication(token='AQTFtPILQkJzXHrHtyQ0rjLe3W0I')

Quick Usage From Python Interpreter

For testing the library using an interpreter, use the quick helper.

from linkedin import server
application = server.quick_api(KEY, SECRET)

This will print the authorization url to the screen. Go into this URL using a browser, after you login, the method will return with an API object you can now use.

application.get_profile()

More

For more information, visit the homepage of the project.