How to create a Redmine wiki page via script?

Question

I want to create a special wiki page on my local Redmine server. It should contain an inventory of some executables from my server. My goal is a script which scans certain folders on my server for these files and put them (with some additional information) in a nice Redmine wiki page.

My first thought was to traverse my server's file system with a simple batch file and to create a SQL expression for putting the results directly into the underlying mySQL database (which contains Redmine's wiki pages). But I consider this too risky and too error-prone.

Then I had the idea to use a script language like python (which I always wanted to learn) to retrieve the information and send it back to the Redmine server, like a web browser would do. This should be a much safer way. But this doesn't seems to be an easy beginner's task when just starting with python - I fail to authenticate myself on the Redmine server.

My last idea was to create a HTML page with python, which could be displayed within a Redmine wiki page with the plugin 'Redmine Wiki Extensions'. But I consider this only as a solution light, because it's not very elegant.

So what I seek is either a new idea to solve this problem or some clues on how to do a proper authentification with python on my Redmine server - maybe I could use a cookie for easier authentification...

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with redmine, but if you are looking for something like having a script that performs some actions the same way you would do in a browser, then mechanize is a library that might be helpful for you unless there's some javascript involved. In that case, then I'd look into something like windmill or selenium to let you drive the web browser.

However, please note using web scraping is also error-prone since any change in the design of the web pages involved might break your scripts.

Regarding the option of using an API as pointed out by the comment from AdamKG, that would be a good option, since there's a REST API that you can use from python if you like. Unfortunately, I don't see anything to let you do what you're looking for and it seems it hasn't yet reached the stable status yet. Anyway, as I said, it's still a good option to consider in the future.