Python LinkedIn

Python interface to the LinkedIn API

This library provides a pure Python interface to the LinkedIn Profile, Group, Company, Jobs, Search, Share, Network and Invitation REST APIs.

LinkedIn provides a service that lets people bring their LinkedIn profiles and networks with them to your site or application via their OAuth based API. This library provides a lightweight interface over a complicated LinkedIn OAuth based API to make it for python programmers easy to use.

Installation

You can install python-linkedin library via pip:

$ pip install python-linkedin

Authentication

The LinkedIn REST API now supports the OAuth 2.0 protocol for authentication. This package provides a full OAuth 2.0 implementation for connecting to LinkedIn as well as an option for using an OAuth 1.0a flow that can be helpful for development purposes or just accessing your own data.

HTTP API example

Set LINKEDIN_API_KEY and LINKEDIN_API_SECRET, configure your app to redirect to http://localhost:8080/code, then execute:

http_api.py
Visit http://localhost:8080 in your browser, curl or similar
A tab in your browser will open up, give LinkedIn permission there
You'll then be presented with a list of available routes, hit any, e.g.:
curl -XGET http://localhost:8080/get_profile

Developer Authentication

To connect to LinkedIn as a developer or just to access your own data, you don't even have to implement an OAuth 2.0 flow that involves redirects. You can simply use the 4 credentials that are provided to you in your LinkedIn appliation as part of an OAuth 1.0a flow and immediately access your data. Here's how:

from linkedin import linkedin

# Define CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET,  
# USER_TOKEN, and USER_SECRET from the credentials 
# provided in your LinkedIn application

# Instantiate the developer authentication class

authentication = linkedin.LinkedInDeveloperAuthentication(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, 
                                                          USER_TOKEN, USER_SECRET, 
                                                          RETURN_URL, linkedin.PERMISSIONS.enums.values())

# Pass it in to the app...

application = linkedin.LinkedInApplication(authentication)

# Use the app....

application.get_profile()

Production Authentication

In order to use the LinkedIn OAuth 2.0, you have an application key and application secret. You can get more detail from here.

For debugging purposes you can use the credentials below. It belongs to my test application. Nothing's harmful.

KEY = 'wFNJekVpDCJtRPFX812pQsJee-gt0zO4X5XmG6wcfSOSlLocxodAXNMbl0_hw3Vl'
SECRET = 'daJDa6_8UcnGMw1yuq9TjoO_PMKukXMo8vEMo7Qv5J-G3SPgrAV0FqFCd0TNjQyG'

You can also get those keys from here.

LinkedIn redirects the user back to your website's URL after granting access (giving proper permissions) to your application. We call that url RETURN URL. Assuming your return url is http://localhost:8000, you can write something like this:

from linkedin import linkedin

API_KEY = 'wFNJekVpDCJtRPFX812pQsJee-gt0zO4X5XmG6wcfSOSlLocxodAXNMbl0_hw3Vl'
API_SECRET = 'daJDa6_8UcnGMw1yuq9TjoO_PMKukXMo8vEMo7Qv5J-G3SPgrAV0FqFCd0TNjQyG'
RETURN_URL = 'http://localhost:8000'

authentication = linkedin.LinkedInAuthentication(API_KEY, API_SECRET, RETURN_URL, linkedin.PERMISSIONS.enums.values())
# Optionally one can send custom "state" value that will be returned from OAuth server
# It can be used to track your user state or something else (it's up to you)
# Be aware that this value is sent to OAuth server AS IS - make sure to encode or hash it
#authorization.state = 'your_encoded_message'
print authentication.authorization_url  # open this url on your browser
application = linkedin.LinkedInApplication(authentication)

When you grant access to the application, you will be redirected to the return url with the following query strings appended to your RETURN_URL:

"http://localhost:8000/?code=AQTXrv3Pe1iWS0EQvLg0NJA8ju_XuiadXACqHennhWih7iRyDSzAm5jaf3R7I8&state=ea34a04b91c72863c82878d2b8f1836c"

This means that the value of the authorization_code is AQTXrv3Pe1iWS0EQvLg0NJA8ju_XuiadXACqHennhWih7iRyDSzAm5jaf3R7I8. After setting it by hand, we can call the .get_access_token() to get the actual token.

authentication.authorization_code = 'AQTXrv3Pe1iWS0EQvLg0NJA8ju_XuiadXACqHennhWih7iRyDSzAm5jaf3R7I8'
authentication.get_access_token()

After you get the access token, you are now permitted to make API calls on behalf of the user who granted access to you app. In addition to that, in order to prevent from going through the OAuth flow for every consecutive request, one can directly assign the access token obtained before to the application instance.

application = linkedin.LinkedInApplication(token='AQTFtPILQkJzXHrHtyQ0rjLe3W0I')

Quick Usage From Python Interpreter

For testing the library using an interpreter, you can benefit from the test server.

from linkedin import server
application = server.quick_api(KEY, SECRET)

This will print the authorization url to the screen. Go into that URL using a browser to grant access to the application. After you do so, the method will return with an API object you can now use.

Profile API

The Profile API returns a member's LinkedIn profile. You can use this call to return one of two versions of a user's profile which are public profile and standard profile. For more information, check out the documentation.

application.get_profile()
{u'firstName': u'ozgur',
 u'headline': u'This is my headline',
 u'lastName': u'vatansever',
 u'siteStandardProfileRequest': {u'url': u'http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=46113651&authType=name&authToken=Egbj&trk=api*a101945*s101945*'}}

There are many field selectors that enable the client fetch more information from the API. All of them used by each API are listed here.

application.get_profile(selectors=['id', 'first-name', 'last-name', 'location', 'distance', 'num-connections', 'skills', 'educations'])
{u'distance': 0,
 u'educations': {u'_total': 1,
  u'values': [{u'activities': u'This is my activity and society field',
    u'degree': u'graduate',
    u'endDate': {u'year': 2009},
    u'fieldOfStudy': u'computer science',
    u'id': 42611838,
    u'notes': u'This is my additional notes field',
    u'schoolName': u'\u0130stanbul Bilgi \xdcniversitesi',
    u'startDate': {u'year': 2004}}]},
 u'firstName': u'ozgur',
 u'id': u'COjFALsKDP',
 u'lastName': u'vatansever',
 u'location': {u'country': {u'code': u'tr'}, u'name': u'Istanbul, Turkey'},
 u'numConnections': 13}

Connections API

The Connections API returns a list of 1st degree connections for a user who has granted access to their account. For more information, you check out its documentation.

To fetch your connections, you simply call .get_connections() method with proper GET querystring:

application.get_connections()
{u'_total': 13,
 u'values': [{u'apiStandardProfileRequest': {u'headers': {u'_total': 1,
     u'values': [{u'name': u'x-li-auth-token', u'value': u'name:16V1033'}]},
    u'url': u'http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/lddvGtD5xk'},
   u'firstName': u'John',
   u'headline': u'Ruby',
   u'id': u'2323SDFSsfd34',
   u'industry': u'Computer Software',
   u'lastName': u'DOE',
   u'location': {u'country': {u'code': u'tr'}, u'name': u'Istanbul, Turkey'},
   u'siteStandardProfileRequest': {u'url': u'http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=049430532&authType=name&authToken=16V8&trk=api*a101945*s101945*'}},
   ....

application.get_connections(selectors=['headline', 'first-name', 'last-name'], params={'start':10, 'count':5})

Search API

There are 3 types of Search APIs. One is the People Search API, second one is the Company Search API and the last one is Jobs Search API.

The People Search API returns information about people. It lets you implement most of what shows up when you do a search for "People" in the top right box on LinkedIn.com. You can get more information from here.

application.search_profile(selectors=[{'people': ['first-name', 'last-name']}], params={'keywords': 'apple microsoft'})
# Search URL is https://api.linkedin.com/v1/people-search:(people:(first-name,last-name))?keywords=apple%20microsoft

{u'people': {u'_count': 10,
  u'_start': 0,
  u'_total': 2,
  u'values': [
   {u'firstName': u'John', u'lastName': 'Doe'},
   {u'firstName': u'Jane', u'lastName': u'Doe'}
  ]}}

The Company Search API enables search across company pages. You can get more information from here.

application.search_company(selectors=[{'companies': ['name', 'universal-name', 'website-url']}], params={'keywords': 'apple microsoft'})
# Search URL is https://api.linkedin.com/v1/company-search:(companies:(name,universal-name,website-url))?keywords=apple%20microsoft

{u'companies': {u'_count': 10,
  u'_start': 0,
  u'_total': 1064,
  u'values': [{u'name': u'Netflix',
    u'universalName': u'netflix',
    u'websiteUrl': u'http://netflix.com'},
   {u'name': u'Alliance Data',
    u'universalName': u'alliance-data',
    u'websiteUrl': u'www.alliancedata.com'},
   {u'name': u'GHA Technologies',
    u'universalName': u'gha-technologies',
    u'websiteUrl': u'www.gha-associates.com'},
   {u'name': u'Intelligent Decisions',
    u'universalName': u'intelligent-decisions',
    u'websiteUrl': u'http://www.intelligent.net'},
   {u'name': u'Mindfire Solutions',
    u'universalName': u'mindfire-solutions',
    u'websiteUrl': u'www.mindfiresolutions.com'},
   {u'name': u'Babel Media',
    u'universalName': u'babel-media',
    u'websiteUrl': u'http://www.babelmedia.com/'},
   {u'name': u'Milestone Technologies',
    u'universalName': u'milestone-technologies',
    u'websiteUrl': u'www.milestonepowered.com'},
   {u'name': u'Denali Advanced Integration',
    u'universalName': u'denali-advanced-integration',
    u'websiteUrl': u'www.denaliai.com'},
   {u'name': u'MicroAge',
    u'universalName': u'microage',
    u'websiteUrl': u'www.microage.com'},
   {u'name': u'TRUSTe',
    u'universalName': u'truste',
    u'websiteUrl': u'http://www.truste.com/'}]}}

The Job Search API enables search across LinkedIn's job postings. You can get more information from here.

application.search_job(selectors=[{'jobs': ['id', 'customer-job-code', 'posting-date']}], params={'title': 'python', 'count': 2})
{u'jobs': {u'_count': 2,
  u'_start': 0,
  u'_total': 206747,
  u'values': [{u'customerJobCode': u'0006YT23WQ',
    u'id': 5174636,
    u'postingDate': {u'day': 21, u'month': 3, u'year': 2013}},
   {u'customerJobCode': u'00023CCVC2',
    u'id': 5174634,
    u'postingDate': {u'day': 21, u'month': 3, u'year': 2013}}]}}

Group API

The Groups API provides rich access to read and interact with LinkedIn’s groups functionality. You can get more information from here. By the help of the interface, you can fetch group details, get your group memberships as well as your posts for a specific group which you are a member of.

application.get_group(41001)
{u'id': u'41001', u'name': u'Object Oriented Programming'}

application.get_memberships(params={'count': 20})
{u'_total': 1,
 u'values': [{u'_key': u'25827',
   u'group': {u'id': u'25827', u'name': u'Python Community'},
   u'membershipState': {u'code': u'member'}}]}

application.get_posts(41001)

application.get_post_comments(
    %POST_ID%,
    selectors=[
        {"creator": ["first-name", "last-name"]},
        "creation-timestamp",
        "text"
    ],
    params={"start": 0, "count": 20}
)

You can also submit a new post into a specific group.

title = 'Scala for the Impatient'
summary = 'A new book has been published'
submitted_url = 'http://horstmann.com/scala/'
submitted_image_url = 'http://horstmann.com/scala/images/cover.png'
description = 'It is a great book for the keen beginners. Check it out!'

application.submit_group_post(41001, title, summary, submitted_url, submitted_image_url, description)

Company API

The Company API:

Retrieves and displays one or more company profiles based on the company ID or universal name.
Returns basic company profile data, such as name, website, and industry.
Returns handles to additional company content, such as RSS stream and Twitter feed.

You can query a company with either its ID or Universal Name. For more information, you can check out the documentation here.

application.get_companies(company_ids=[1035], universal_names=['apple'], selectors=['name'], params={'is-company-admin': 'true'})
# 1035 is Microsoft
# The URL is as follows: https://api.linkedin.com/v1/companies::(1035,universal-name=apple)?is-company-admin=true

{u'_total': 2,
 u'values': [{u'_key': u'1035', u'name': u'Microsoft'},
  {u'_key': u'universal-name=apple', u'name': u'Apple'}]}

# Get the latest updates about Microsoft
application.get_company_updates(1035, params={'count': 2})
{u'_count': 2,
 u'_start': 0,
 u'_total': 58,
 u'values': [{u'isCommentable': True,
   u'isLikable': True,
   u'isLiked': False,
   u'numLikes': 0,
   u'timestamp': 1363855486620,
   u'updateComments': {u'_total': 0},
   u'updateContent': {u'company': {u'id': 1035, u'name': u'Microsoft'},
    u'companyJobUpdate': {u'action': {u'code': u'created'},
     u'job': {u'company': {u'id': 1035, u'name': u'Microsoft'},
      u'description': u'Job Category: SalesLocation: Sacramento, CA, USJob ID: 812346-106756Division: Retail StoresStore...',
      u'id': 5173319,
      u'locationDescription': u'Sacramento, CA, US',
      u'position': {u'title': u'Store Manager, Specialty Store'},
      u'siteJobRequest': {u'url': u'http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=5173319'}}}},
   u'updateKey': u'UNIU-c1035-5720424522989961216-FOLLOW_CMPY',
   u'updateType': u'CMPY'},
  {u'isCommentable': True,
   u'isLikable': True,
   u'isLiked': False,
   u'numLikes': 0,
   u'timestamp': 1363855486617,
   u'updateComments': {u'_total': 0},
   u'updateContent': {u'company': {u'id': 1035, u'name': u'Microsoft'},
    u'companyJobUpdate': {u'action': {u'code': u'created'},
     u'job': {u'company': {u'id': 1035, u'name': u'Microsoft'},
      u'description': u'Job Category: Software Engineering: TestLocation: Redmond, WA, USJob ID: 794953-81760Division:...',
      u'id': 5173313,
      u'locationDescription': u'Redmond, WA, US',
      u'position': {u'title': u'Software Development Engineer in Test, Senior-IEB-MSCIS (794953)'},
      u'siteJobRequest': {u'url': u'http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=5173313'}}}},
   u'updateKey': u'UNIU-c1035-5720424522977378304-FOLLOW_CMPY',
   u'updateType': u'CMPY'}]}

You can follow or unfollow a specific company as well.

application.follow_company(1035)
True

application.unfollow_company(1035)
True

Job API

The Jobs APIs provide access to view jobs and job data. You can get more information from its documentation.

application.get_job(job_id=5174636)
{u'active': True,
 u'company': {u'id': 2329, u'name': u'Schneider Electric'},
 u'descriptionSnippet': u"The Industrial Accounts Sales Manager is a quota carrying senior sales position principally responsible for generating new sales and growing company's share of wallet within the industrial business, contracting business and consulting engineering business. The primary objective is to build and establish strong and lasting relationships with technical teams and at executive level within specific in",
 u'id': 5174636,
 u'position': {u'title': u'Industrial Accounts Sales Manager'},
 u'postingTimestamp': 1363860033000}

You can also fetch you job bookmarks.

application.get_job_bookmarks()
{u'_total': 0}

Share API

Network updates serve as one of the core experiences on LinkedIn, giving users the ability to share rich content to their professional network. You can get more information from here.

application.submit_share('Posting from the API using JSON', 'A title for your share', None, 'http://www.linkedin.com', 'http://d.pr/3OWS')
{'updateKey': u'UNIU-8219502-5705061301949063168-SHARE'
 'updateURL': 'http://www.linkedin.com/updates?discuss=&amp;scope=8219502&amp;stype=M&amp;topic=5705061301949063168&amp;type=U&amp;a=aovi'}

Network API

The Get Network Updates API returns the users network updates, which is the LinkedIn term for the user's feed. This call returns most of what shows up in the middle column of the LinkedIn.com home page, either for the member or the member's connections. You can get more information from here.

There are many network update types. You can look at them by importing NETWORK_UPDATES enumeration.

from linkedin.linkedin import NETWORK_UPDATES
print NETWORK_UPDATES.enums
{'APPLICATION': 'APPS',
 'CHANGED_PROFILE': 'PRFU',
 'COMPANY': 'CMPY',
 'CONNECTION': 'CONN',
 'EXTENDED_PROFILE': 'PRFX',
 'GROUP': 'JGRP',
 'JOB': 'JOBS',
 'PICTURE': 'PICT',
 'SHARED': 'SHAR',
 'VIRAL': 'VIRL'}

update_types = (NETWORK_UPDATES.CONNECTION, NETWORK_UPDATES.PICTURE)
application.get_network_updates(update_types)

{u'_total': 1,
 u'values': [{u'isCommentable': True,
   u'isLikable': True,
   u'isLiked': False,
   u'numLikes': 0,
   u'timestamp': 1363470126509,
   u'updateComments': {u'_total': 0},
   u'updateContent': {u'person': {u'apiStandardProfileRequest': {u'headers': {u'_total': 1,
       u'values': [{u'name': u'x-li-auth-token', u'value': u'name:Egbj'}]},
      u'url': u'http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/COjFALsKDP'},
     u'firstName': u'ozgur',
     u'headline': u'This is my headline',
     u'id': u'COjFALsKDP',
     u'lastName': u'vatansever',
     u'siteStandardProfileRequest': {u'url': u'http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=46113651&authType=name&authToken=Egbj&trk=api*a101945*s101945*'}}},
   u'updateKey': u'UNIU-46113651-5718808205493026816-SHARE',
   u'updateType': u'SHAR'}]}

Invitation API

The Invitation API allows your users to invite people they find in your application to their LinkedIn network. You can get more information from here.

from linkedin.models import LinkedInRecipient, LinkedInInvitation
recipient = LinkedInRecipient(None, '[email protected]', 'John', 'Doe')
print recipient.json
{'person': {'_path': '/people/[email protected]',
  'first-name': 'John',
  'last-name': 'Doe'}}

invitation = LinkedInInvitation('Hello John', "What's up? Can I add you as a friend?", (recipient,), 'friend')
print invitation.json
{'body': "What's up? Can I add you as a friend?",
 'item-content': {'invitation-request': {'connect-type': 'friend'}},
 'recipients': {'values': [{'person': {'_path': '/people/[email protected]',
     'first-name': 'John',
     'last-name': 'Doe'}}]},
 'subject': 'Hello John'}

application.send_invitation(invitation)
True

Throttle Limits

LinkedIn API keys are throttled by default. You should take a look at the Throttle Limits Documentation to get more information about it.

Python interface to the LinkedIn API

Related tags

Overview

Python LinkedIn

Installation

Authentication

HTTP API example

Developer Authentication

Production Authentication

Quick Usage From Python Interpreter

Profile API

Connections API

Search API

Group API

Company API

Job API

Share API

Network API

Invitation API

Throttle Limits

Owner

ozgur

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