Login now includes a hidden captcha that prevents python-myfitnesspal from logging-in

Morning,

I wonder if something API-side has changed? Up to last night I was connecting fine, now this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/andy/MFP/importmyfitnesspal.py", line 19, in <module>
    client = myfitnesspal.Client('############', password='###################')
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/dist-packages/myfitnesspal/client.py", line 80, in __init__
    self._login()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/dist-packages/myfitnesspal/client.py", line 132, in _login
    raise MyfitnesspalLoginError()

Any thoughts?

[coddingtonbear]

OK… good and bad news!

The good news is that I’ve updated this library such that it’s again able to access MyFitnessPal on your behalf. You can find those changes in version 2.0.0 of this library.

The bad news is that, as you might guess from the major version bump, the way we access login credentials had to be changed in ways that may limit how useful this library is to you. I’m really sorry about that, but I don’t see an alternative at the moment.

Now that MyFitnessPal has added a hidden captcha to their log in flow, this library will no longer be able to log in directly in the manner it was historically doing so. Instead, this library now uses the browser_cookie3 library for gathering cookies from your local browser for use when interacting with MyFitnessPal.

To be a little more concrete:

• Before: you could store a username and password combination in your system keyring, or provide a username and password combination directly to this library for use when interacting with MyFitnessPal.
• Now: you must log in to MyFitnessPal using an actual real-life browser in the same environment as you would use this library, and this library will find the credentials your browser stored after logging-in for use when interacting with MyFitnessPal.

If any of you have any clever ideas of other ways of getting around this limitation, I’d love to hear them!

Cheers & good luck!

[coddingtonbear]

You can absolutely instantiate your own cookiejar and hand it directly to myfitnesspal.Client – just import the class from http.cookiejar.CookieJar and set the cookies you need. See the cookiejar parameter on the client here: https://python-myfitnesspal.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/client.html.

Unfortunately, though, you’re still going to need to log-in in an actual browser somewhere to find your session token given that the log-in flow has that invisible captcha. There is unfortunately no avenue forward via which we can return to accepting a username/password combination directly as we were before while a captcha is present.