Using wget to login to Mediawiki—Creative Commons Labs

For a couple years CC has been using the Pywikipediabot to do a few small operations on a password-protected, private installation of Mediawiki. It used to create a basic page, then ask people to add information to that page, and then a few days later it would email the contents of that page to a group of people.

As of a today we are no longer using Pywikipediabot to create a page, but only to mail the contents of a page. It occurred to me that Pywikipediabot was really overkill for such a small task. I decided to write a simple shell script using wget to accomplish this task. My initial thought was to use the Mediawiki API, but all the documents I found indicated that if one merely wanted the content of a page, to use the action query parameter to index.php, such as /SomeArticle?action=raw. It wasn't even clear to me that there would be a way to accomplish what I wanted via the API without having to parse an XML response (there may be, I just didn't readily find it).

So I decided to use wget to work with the normal user interface of Mediawiki, but I didn't quickly find any good information on how to go about this, or what I found was outdated and no longer worked. I'm posting this here in case it could be useful to anyone else. Here is the basic idea:

#!/bin/bash

PAGE_TITLE="Some_page_title"

RCPT_TO=group@somesite.com
MAIL_FROM="'John Q. Public' <management@somesite.com>"
MAIL_SUBJECT="Contents of ${PAGE_TITLE}"

MW_LOGIN="Some Login"
MW_PASSWD="somepassword"

# Mediawiki uses a login token, and we must have it for this to work.
WP_LOGIN_TOKEN=$(wget -q -O - --save-cookies cookies.txt --keep-session-cookies 
                                     http://www.somesite.com/Special:UserLogin 
                                     | grep wpLoginToken | grep -o '[a-z0-9]{32}')

wget -q --load-cookies cookies.txt --save-cookies cookies.txt --keep-session-cookies 
        --post-data "wpName=${MW_LOGIN}&wpPassword=${MW_PASSWD}
&wpRemember=1&wpLoginattempt=Log%20in&wpLoginToken=${WP_LOGIN_TOKEN}" 
        "http://www.somesite.com/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&action=submitlogin&type=login"

wget -q -O email_body.txt --load-cookies cookies.txt 
        "http://www.somesite.com/${PAGE_TITLE}?action=raw"

cat email_body.txt | mail -s "${MAIL_SUBJECT}" -a "From: ${MAIL_FROM}" ${RCPT_TO}