In Python, there are a variety of libraries that can take care of your HTTP request process using REST including Requests, Urllib2 and HTTPLib. In this example, we use the Requests library as it provides good support for authentication and session handling.

s=requests.Session()
s.auth=('user','password')
s.verify=False #disables SSL certificate verification

In the example code, we use an option to disable SSL certificate verification. This is helpful when testing code against a demonstration environment using the default self-signed certificates, as these may not validate properly causing the HTTP request to fail. In a production environment, this line is not recommended and your SSL certificates should be updated to be fully valid and signed by a recognized certificate authority, or you should at least ensure that the Oracle VM Manager internal CA certificate is installed locally for validation purposes.

Since we would like to use JSON for all of our interactions with the API, it may prove worthwhile to take advantage of the Requests library's ability to append headers to all requests within a session. To do this, we can set the appropriate headers now and save ourselves the effort of doing this for each HTTP request that we make:

s.headers.update({'Accept': 'application/json', 'Content-Type': 'application/json'})

Finally, throughout this guide we are going to refer to the BaseURI that the REST API can be located on. For the sake of keeping our code relatively brief, we can set a variable for this now:

baseUri='https://127.0.0.1:7002/ovm/core/wsapi/rest'

The baseUri specified above follows the format described in Section 2.1, “Connecting to the REST Base URI”. It may vary depending on your own environment and where you intend your script to run from. Note that you can substitute the hostname and port values according to your own application requirements. In this example, we are assuming that you are running your Python scripts on the same system where Oracle VM Manager is hosted.

What about Certificate-based Authentication?

As already mentioned, it is possible to use a signed SSL certificate to authenticate against Oracle VM Manager via the REST API. This allows you to disable any requirement to enter a username or password to perform authentication. To do this, you must have the certificate and key stored in a single PEM file available to your application. The Requests library allows you to send a certificate with each request, or to set it to be used for every request within a session:

s.cert='/path/to/mycertificate.pem

As long as the certificate is valid and can be authenticated by Oracle VM Manager, the session is automatically logged in using your certificate.