Python Bindings for the Plex API

Python-PlexAPI

Overview

Unofficial Python bindings for the Plex API. Our goal is to match all capabilities of the official Plex Web Client. A few of the many features we currently support are:

• Navigate local or remote shared libraries.
• Perform library actions such as scan, analyze, empty trash.
• Remote control and play media on connected clients, including Controlling Sonos speakers
• Listen in on all Plex Server notifications.

Installation & Documentation

pip install plexapi

Documentation can be found at Read the Docs.

Join our Discord for support and discussion.

Getting a PlexServer Instance

There are two types of authentication. If you are running on a separate network or using Plex Users you can log into MyPlex to get a PlexServer instance. An example of this is below. NOTE: Servername below is the name of the server (not the hostname and port). If logged into Plex Web you can see the server name in the top left above your available libraries.

from plexapi.myplex import MyPlexAccount
account = MyPlexAccount('<USERNAME>', '<PASSWORD>')
plex = account.resource('<SERVERNAME>').connect()  # returns a PlexServer instance

If you want to avoid logging into MyPlex and you already know your auth token string, you can use the PlexServer object directly as above, by passing in the baseurl and auth token directly.

from plexapi.server import PlexServer
baseurl = 'http://plexserver:32400'
token = '2ffLuB84dqLswk9skLos'
plex = PlexServer(baseurl, token)

Usage Examples

# Example 1: List all unwatched movies.
movies = plex.library.section('Movies')
for video in movies.search(unwatched=True):
    print(video.title)

# Example 2: Mark all Game of Thrones episodes watched.
plex.library.section('TV Shows').get('Game of Thrones').markWatched()

# Example 3: List all clients connected to the Server.
for client in plex.clients():
    print(client.title)

# Example 4: Play the movie Cars on another client.
# Note: Client must be on same network as server.
cars = plex.library.section('Movies').get('Cars')
client = plex.client("Michael's iPhone")
client.playMedia(cars)

# Example 5: List all content with the word 'Game' in the title.
for video in plex.search('Game'):
    print('%s (%s)' % (video.title, video.TYPE))

# Example 6: List all movies directed by the same person as Elephants Dream.
movies = plex.library.section('Movies')
elephants_dream = movies.get('Elephants Dream')
director = elephants_dream.directors[0]
for movie in movies.search(None, director=director):
    print(movie.title)

# Example 7: List files for the latest episode of The 100.
last_episode = plex.library.section('TV Shows').get('The 100').episodes()[-1]
for part in last_episode.iterParts():
    print(part.file)

# Example 8: Get audio/video/all playlists
for playlist in plex.playlists():
    print(playlist.title)

# Example 9: Rate the 100 four stars.
plex.library.section('TV Shows').get('The 100').rate(8.0)

Controlling Sonos speakers

To control Sonos speakers directly using Plex APIs, the following requirements must be met:

1. Active Plex Pass subscription
2. Sonos account linked to Plex account
3. Plex remote access enabled

Due to the design of Sonos music services, the API calls to control Sonos speakers route through https://sonos.plex.tv and back via the Plex server’s remote access. Actual media playback is local unless networking restrictions prevent the Sonos speakers from connecting to the Plex server directly.

from plexapi.myplex import MyPlexAccount
from plexapi.server import PlexServer

baseurl = 'http://plexserver:32400'
token = '2ffLuB84dqLswk9skLos'

account = MyPlexAccount(token)
server = PlexServer(baseurl, token)

# List available speakers/groups
for speaker in account.sonos_speakers():
    print(speaker.title)

# Obtain PlexSonosPlayer instance
speaker = account.sonos_speaker("Kitchen")

album = server.library.section('Music').get('Stevie Wonder').album('Innervisions')

# Speaker control examples
speaker.playMedia(album)
speaker.pause()
speaker.setVolume(10)
speaker.skipNext()

Running tests over PlexAPI

Use:

tools/plex-boostraptest.py

with appropriate arguments and add this new server to a shared user which username is defined in environment veriable SHARED_USERNAME. It uses official docker image to create a proper instance.

For skipping the docker and reuse a existing server use

python plex-bootstraptest.py --no-docker --username USERNAME --password PASSWORD --server-name NAME-OF-YOUR-SEVER

Also in order to run most of the tests you have to provide some environment variables:

• PLEXAPI_AUTH_SERVER_BASEURL containing an URL to your Plex instance, e.g. http://127.0.0.1:32400 (without trailing slash)
• PLEXAPI_AUTH_MYPLEX_USERNAME and PLEXAPI_AUTH_MYPLEX_PASSWORD with your MyPlex username and password accordingly

After this step you can run tests with following command:

py.test tests -rxXs --ignore=tests/test_sync.py

Some of the tests in main test-suite require a shared user in your account (e.g. test_myplex_users, test_myplex_updateFriend, etc.), you need to provide a valid shared user’s username to get them running you need to provide the username of the shared user as an environment variable SHARED_USERNAME. You can enable a Guest account and simply pass Guest as SHARED_USERNAME (or just create a user like plexapitest and play with it).

To be able to run tests over Mobile Sync api you have to some some more environment variables, to following values exactly:

• PLEXAPI_HEADER_PROVIDES=‘controller,sync-target’
• PLEXAPI_HEADER_PLATFORM=iOS
• PLEXAPI_HEADER_PLATFORM_VERSION=11.4.1
• PLEXAPI_HEADER_DEVICE=iPhone

And finally run the sync-related tests:

py.test tests/test_sync.py -rxXs

Common Questions

Why are you using camelCase and not following PEP8 guidelines?

This API reads XML documents provided by MyPlex and the Plex Server. We decided to conform to their style so that the API variable names directly match with the provided XML documents.

Why don’t you offer feature XYZ?

This library is meant to be a wrapper around the XML pages the Plex server provides. If we are not providing an API that is offerered in the XML pages, please let us know! – Adding additional features beyond that should be done outside the scope of this library.

What are some helpful links if trying to understand the raw Plex API?

• https://github.com/plexinc/plex-media-player/wiki/Remote-control-API
• https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/104353/pms-web-api-documentation
• https://github.com/Arcanemagus/plex-api/wiki

Download Details:

Author: pkkid
Download Link: Download The Source Code
Official Website: https://github.com/pkkid/python-plexapi
License: BSD-3-Clause

#python #api

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

Top 10 API Security Threats Every API Team Should Know

As more and more data is exposed via APIs either as API-first companies or for the explosion of single page apps/JAMStack, API security can no longer be an afterthought. The hard part about APIs is that it provides direct access to large amounts of data while bypassing browser precautions. Instead of worrying about SQL injection and XSS issues, you should be concerned about the bad actor who was able to paginate through all your customer records and their data.

Typical prevention mechanisms like Captchas and browser fingerprinting won’t work since APIs by design need to handle a very large number of API accesses even by a single customer. So where do you start? The first thing is to put yourself in the shoes of a hacker and then instrument your APIs to detect and block common attacks along with unknown unknowns for zero-day exploits. Some of these are on the OWASP Security API list, but not all.

Insecure pagination and resource limits

Most APIs provide access to resources that are lists of entities such as /users or /widgets. A client such as a browser would typically filter and paginate through this list to limit the number items returned to a client like so:

First Call: GET /items?skip=0&take=10 
Second Call: GET /items?skip=10&take=10

However, if that entity has any PII or other information, then a hacker could scrape that endpoint to get a dump of all entities in your database. This could be most dangerous if those entities accidently exposed PII or other sensitive information, but could also be dangerous in providing competitors or others with adoption and usage stats for your business or provide scammers with a way to get large email lists. See how Venmo data was scraped

A naive protection mechanism would be to check the take count and throw an error if greater than 100 or 1000. The problem with this is two-fold:

1. For data APIs, legitimate customers may need to fetch and sync a large number of records such as via cron jobs. Artificially small pagination limits can force your API to be very chatty decreasing overall throughput. Max limits are to ensure memory and scalability requirements are met (and prevent certain DDoS attacks), not to guarantee security.
2. This offers zero protection to a hacker that writes a simple script that sleeps a random delay between repeated accesses.

skip = 0
while True:    response = requests.post('https://api.acmeinc.com/widgets?take=10&skip=' + skip),                      headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer' + ' ' + sys.argv[1]})    print("Fetched 10 items")    sleep(randint(100,1000))    skip += 10

How to secure against pagination attacks

To secure against pagination attacks, you should track how many items of a single resource are accessed within a certain time period for each user or API key rather than just at the request level. By tracking API resource access at the user level, you can block a user or API key once they hit a threshold such as “touched 1,000,000 items in a one hour period”. This is dependent on your API use case and can even be dependent on their subscription with you. Like a Captcha, this can slow down the speed that a hacker can exploit your API, like a Captcha if they have to create a new user account manually to create a new API key.

Insecure API key generation

Most APIs are protected by some sort of API key or JWT (JSON Web Token). This provides a natural way to track and protect your API as API security tools can detect abnormal API behavior and block access to an API key automatically. However, hackers will want to outsmart these mechanisms by generating and using a large pool of API keys from a large number of users just like a web hacker would use a large pool of IP addresses to circumvent DDoS protection.

How to secure against API key pools

The easiest way to secure against these types of attacks is by requiring a human to sign up for your service and generate API keys. Bot traffic can be prevented with things like Captcha and 2-Factor Authentication. Unless there is a legitimate business case, new users who sign up for your service should not have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Instead, only trusted customers should have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Go one step further and ensure any anomaly detection for abnormal behavior is done at the user and account level, not just for each API key.

Accidental key exposure

APIs are used in a way that increases the probability credentials are leaked:

1. APIs are expected to be accessed over indefinite time periods, which increases the probability that a hacker obtains a valid API key that’s not expired. You save that API key in a server environment variable and forget about it. This is a drastic contrast to a user logging into an interactive website where the session expires after a short duration.
2. The consumer of an API has direct access to the credentials such as when debugging via Postman or CURL. It only takes a single developer to accidently copy/pastes the CURL command containing the API key into a public forum like in GitHub Issues or Stack Overflow.
3. API keys are usually bearer tokens without requiring any other identifying information. APIs cannot leverage things like one-time use tokens or 2-factor authentication.

If a key is exposed due to user error, one may think you as the API provider has any blame. However, security is all about reducing surface area and risk. Treat your customer data as if it’s your own and help them by adding guards that prevent accidental key exposure.

How to prevent accidental key exposure

The easiest way to prevent key exposure is by leveraging two tokens rather than one. A refresh token is stored as an environment variable and can only be used to generate short lived access tokens. Unlike the refresh token, these short lived tokens can access the resources, but are time limited such as in hours or days.

The customer will store the refresh token with other API keys. Then your SDK will generate access tokens on SDK init or when the last access token expires. If a CURL command gets pasted into a GitHub issue, then a hacker would need to use it within hours reducing the attack vector (unless it was the actual refresh token which is low probability)

Exposure to DDoS attacks

APIs open up entirely new business models where customers can access your API platform programmatically. However, this can make DDoS protection tricky. Most DDoS protection is designed to absorb and reject a large number of requests from bad actors during DDoS attacks but still need to let the good ones through. This requires fingerprinting the HTTP requests to check against what looks like bot traffic. This is much harder for API products as all traffic looks like bot traffic and is not coming from a browser where things like cookies are present.

Stopping DDoS attacks

The magical part about APIs is almost every access requires an API Key. If a request doesn’t have an API key, you can automatically reject it which is lightweight on your servers (Ensure authentication is short circuited very early before later middleware like request JSON parsing). So then how do you handle authenticated requests? The easiest is to leverage rate limit counters for each API key such as to handle X requests per minute and reject those above the threshold with a 429 HTTP response. There are a variety of algorithms to do this such as leaky bucket and fixed window counters.

Incorrect server security

APIs are no different than web servers when it comes to good server hygiene. Data can be leaked due to misconfigured SSL certificate or allowing non-HTTPS traffic. For modern applications, there is very little reason to accept non-HTTPS requests, but a customer could mistakenly issue a non HTTP request from their application or CURL exposing the API key. APIs do not have the protection of a browser so things like HSTS or redirect to HTTPS offer no protection.

How to ensure proper SSL

Test your SSL implementation over at Qualys SSL Test or similar tool. You should also block all non-HTTP requests which can be done within your load balancer. You should also remove any HTTP headers scrub any error messages that leak implementation details. If your API is used only by your own apps or can only be accessed server-side, then review Authoritative guide to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing for REST APIs

Incorrect caching headers

APIs provide access to dynamic data that’s scoped to each API key. Any caching implementation should have the ability to scope to an API key to prevent cross-pollution. Even if you don’t cache anything in your infrastructure, you could expose your customers to security holes. If a customer with a proxy server was using multiple API keys such as one for development and one for production, then they could see cross-pollinated data.

#api management #api security #api best practices #api providers #security analytics #api management policies #api access tokens #api access #api security risks #api access keys

Why use Python for Software Development

No programming language is pretty much as diverse as Python. It enables building cutting edge applications effortlessly. Developers are as yet investigating the full capability of end-to-end Python development services in various areas. 

By areas, we mean FinTech, HealthTech, InsureTech, Cybersecurity, and that's just the beginning. These are New Economy areas, and Python has the ability to serve every one of them. The vast majority of them require massive computational abilities. Python's code is dynamic and powerful - equipped for taking care of the heavy traffic and substantial algorithmic capacities. 

Programming advancement is multidimensional today. Endeavor programming requires an intelligent application with AI and ML capacities. Shopper based applications require information examination to convey a superior client experience. Netflix, Trello, and Amazon are genuine instances of such applications. Python assists with building them effortlessly. 

5 Reasons to Utilize Python for Programming Web Apps 

Python can do such numerous things that developers can't discover enough reasons to admire it. Python application development isn't restricted to web and enterprise applications. It is exceptionally adaptable and superb for a wide range of uses.

Robust frameworks 

Python is known for its tools and frameworks. There's a structure for everything. Django is helpful for building web applications, venture applications, logical applications, and mathematical processing. Flask is another web improvement framework with no conditions. 

Web2Py, CherryPy, and Falcon offer incredible capabilities to customize Python development services. A large portion of them are open-source frameworks that allow quick turn of events. 

Simple to read and compose 

Python has an improved sentence structure - one that is like the English language. New engineers for Python can undoubtedly understand where they stand in the development process. The simplicity of composing allows quick application building. 

The motivation behind building Python, as said by its maker Guido Van Rossum, was to empower even beginner engineers to comprehend the programming language. The simple coding likewise permits developers to roll out speedy improvements without getting confused by pointless subtleties. 

Utilized by the best 

Alright - Python isn't simply one more programming language. It should have something, which is the reason the business giants use it. Furthermore, that too for different purposes. Developers at Google use Python to assemble framework organization systems, parallel information pusher, code audit, testing and QA, and substantially more. Netflix utilizes Python web development services for its recommendation algorithm and media player. 

Massive community support 

Python has a steadily developing community that offers enormous help. From amateurs to specialists, there's everybody. There are a lot of instructional exercises, documentation, and guides accessible for Python web development solutions. 

Today, numerous universities start with Python, adding to the quantity of individuals in the community. Frequently, Python designers team up on various tasks and help each other with algorithmic, utilitarian, and application critical thinking. 

Progressive applications 

Python is the greatest supporter of data science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence at any enterprise software development company. Its utilization cases in cutting edge applications are the most compelling motivation for its prosperity. Python is the second most well known tool after R for data analytics.

The simplicity of getting sorted out, overseeing, and visualizing information through unique libraries makes it ideal for data based applications. TensorFlow for neural networks and OpenCV for computer vision are two of Python's most well known use cases for Machine learning applications.

Summary

Thinking about the advances in programming and innovation, Python is a YES for an assorted scope of utilizations. Game development, web application development services, GUI advancement, ML and AI improvement, Enterprise and customer applications - every one of them uses Python to its full potential. 

The disadvantages of Python web improvement arrangements are regularly disregarded by developers and organizations because of the advantages it gives. They focus on quality over speed and performance over blunders. That is the reason it's a good idea to utilize Python for building the applications of the future.

#python development services #python development company #python app development #python development #python in web development #python software development

Public ASX100 APIs: The Essential List

We’ve conducted some initial research into the public APIs of the ASX100 because we regularly have conversations about what others are doing with their APIs and what best practices look like. Being able to point to good local examples and explain what is happening in Australia is a key part of this conversation.

Method

The method used for this initial research was to obtain a list of the ASX100 (as of 18 September 2020). Then work through each company looking at the following:

1. Whether the company had a public API: this was found by googling “[company name] API” and “[company name] API developer” and “[company name] developer portal”. Sometimes the company’s website was navigated or searched.
2. Some data points about the API were noted, such as the URL of the portal/documentation and the method they used to publish the API (portal, documentation, web page).
3. Observations were recorded that piqued the interest of the researchers (you will find these below).
4. Other notes were made to support future research.
5. You will find a summary of the data in the infographic below.

Data

With regards to how the APIs are shared:

• Documentation is where just the Swagger/OpenAPI docs are hosted somewhere. e.g. https://api.linkgroup.com/member/docs/index
• Portal is where an interactive portal has been developed. e.g. https://dev.telstra.com/
• The web page is where the company has a single page that isn’t interactive explaining their Public APIs. e.g. https://www.bendigoadelaide.com.au/banking-products-api.asp

#api #api-development #api-analytics #apis #api-integration #api-testing #api-security #api-gateway

An API-First Approach For Designing Restful APIs | Hacker Noon

I’ve been working with Restful APIs for some time now and one thing that I love to do is to talk about APIs.

So, today I will show you how to build an API using the API-First approach and Design First with OpenAPI Specification.

First thing first, if you don’t know what’s an API-First approach means, it would be nice you stop reading this and check the blog post that I wrote to the Farfetchs blog where I explain everything that you need to know to start an API using API-First.

Preparing the ground

Before you get your hands dirty, let’s prepare the ground and understand the use case that will be developed.

Tools

If you desire to reproduce the examples that will be shown here, you will need some of those items below.

• NodeJS
• OpenAPI Specification
• Text Editor (I’ll use VSCode)
• Command Line

Use Case

To keep easy to understand, let’s use the Todo List App, it is a very common concept beyond the software development community.

#api #rest-api #openai #api-first-development #api-design #apis #restful-apis #restful-api

What Are Good Traits That Make Great API Product Managers

As more companies realize the benefits of an API-first mindset and treating their APIs as products, there is a growing need for good API product management practices to make a company’s API strategy a reality. However, API product management is a relatively new field with little established knowledge on what is API product management and what a PM should be doing to ensure their API platform is successful.

Many of the current practices of API product management have carried over from other products and platforms like web and mobile, but API products have their own unique set of challenges due to the way they are marketed and used by customers. While it would be rare for a consumer mobile app to have detailed developer docs and a developer relations team, you’ll find these items common among API product-focused companies. A second unique challenge is that APIs are very developer-centric and many times API PMs are engineers themselves. Yet, this can cause an API or developer program to lose empathy for what their customers actually want if good processes are not in place. Just because you’re an engineer, don’t assume your customers will want the same features and use cases that you want.

This guide lays out what is API product management and some of the things you should be doing to be a good product manager.

#api #analytics #apis #product management #api best practices #api platform #api adoption #product managers #api product #api metrics