HTTP Error 403: Forbidden while downloading file using urllib

Question

I have this line of code: urllib.request.urlretrieve('http://lolupdater.com/downloads/LPB.exe', 'LPBtest.exe'), but when I run it, it throws an error urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden.

Whitewash

Answer 1

That looks to be an actual HTTP 403: Forbidden error. Python urllib throws the exception when it encounters an HTTP status code (documented here). 403 in general means: "The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it." You will need to add HTTP headers to identify yourself and avoid the 403 error, documentation on Python urllib headers. Here is an example using urlopen:

import urllib.request
req = urllib.request.Request('http://lolupdater.com/downloads/LPB.exe', headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'})
response = urllib.request.urlopen(req)

With Python 3 urllib.urlretrieve() is considered legacy. I would recommend Python Requests for this, here is a working example:

import requests

url = 'http://lolupdater.com/downloads/LPB.exe'
r = requests.get(url)
with open('LPBtest.exe', 'wb') as outfile:
    outfile.write(r.content)

Digitalis

But how to save the data than if I have an executable? – Pothouse

@JakubBláha I updated my answer. It looks like urllib.urlretrieve() doesn't allow you to set headers. I would recommend using Python Requests, its definitely the more accepted way to do what you are trying to do, hope it helps. – Digitalis

i got "FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory:" , for both solutions... – Yuri

Answer 2

If youre downloading a pdf using urllib, you might get the 403 error due to not having specified headers. To fix this and download any pdf file with its link use:

headers={"User-Agent": "_ANY_USER"}
pdf_response = requests.get(pdf_url, headers=headers)
with open(f'C:/Users/username/path/{file_name}.pdf', 
'wb') as f:
f.write(pdf_response.content)

Nepean