Yes, MechanicalSoup can handle SSL certificate verification. MechanicalSoup is a Python library built on top of the popular requests library for HTTP requests, and lxml for parsing HTML. Since it uses requests under the hood, it inherits requests' abilities, including SSL certificate verification.
By default, when you make a request to a secure site (https://) with MechanicalSoup, the SSL certificate will be verified against a set of system-provided CA (Certificate Authority) certificates. If the certificate cannot be verified, requests will raise an SSLError.
Here's an example of how to use MechanicalSoup with default SSL verification:
import mechanicalsoup
# Create a browser object
browser = mechanicalsoup.Browser()
# By default, SSL verification is enabled
try:
response = browser.get("https://secure.example.com")
print(response.text)
except Exception as e:
print("SSL verification failed:", e)
If you want to explicitly control the verification process, you can pass the verify argument to the get() or post() methods. This argument is the same as the one used by the requests library.
To disable SSL verification (which is not recommended for production code due to security reasons), you'd set verify to False:
response = browser.get("https://secure.example.com", verify=False)
And if you have a custom CA bundle that you wish to use for verification, you can pass the path to the CA bundle file as the verify argument:
response = browser.get("https://secure.example.com", verify="/path/to/custom/cabundle.pem")
Remember that bypassing SSL verification or using a custom CA bundle should be done with caution, as it can expose you to security risks such as man-in-the-middle attacks. Always ensure that you're fully aware of the security implications before altering the default SSL verification behavior.
