How do I authenticate a urllib2 script in order to access HTTPS web services from a Django site?
def login( base_address, username=None, password=None ):

    # prompt for the username (if needed), password
    if username == None:
        username = raw_input( 'Username: ' )
    if password == None:
        password = getpass.getpass( 'Password: ' )
    log.info( 'Logging in %s' % username )

    # fetch the login page in order to get the csrf token
    cookieHandler = urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor()
    opener = urllib2.build_opener( urllib2.HTTPSHandler(), cookieHandler )
    urllib2.install_opener( opener )

    login_url = base_address + PATH_TO_LOGIN
    log.debug( "login_url: " + login_url )
    login_page = opener.open( login_url )

    # attempt to get the csrf token from the cookie jar
    csrf_cookie = None
    for cookie in cookieHandler.cookiejar:
        if cookie.name == 'csrftoken':
             csrf_cookie = cookie
             break
    if not cookie:
        raise IOError( "No csrf cookie found" )
    log.debug(  "found csrf cookie: " + str( csrf_cookie ) )
    log.debug(  "csrf_token = %s" % csrf_cookie.value )

    # login using the usr, pwd, and csrf token
    login_data = urllib.urlencode( dict(
        username=username, password=password,
        csrfmiddlewaretoken=csrf_cookie.value ) )
    log.debug( "login_data: %s" % login_data )

    req = urllib2.Request( login_url, login_data )
    response = urllib2.urlopen( req )
    # <--- 403: FORBIDDEN here

    log.debug( 'response url:n' + str( response.geturl() ) + 'n' )
    log.debug( 'response info:n' + str( response.info() ) + 'n' )

    # should redirect to the welcome page here, if back at log in - refused
    if response.geturl() == login_url:
        raise IOError( 'Authentication refused' )

    log.info( 't%s is logged in' % username )
    # save the cookies/opener for further actions
    return opener

import urllib
import urllib2
import contextlib


def login(login_url, username, password):
    """
    Login to site
    """
    cookies = urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor()
    opener = urllib2.build_opener(cookies)
    urllib2.install_opener(opener)

    opener.open(login_url)

    try:
        token = [x.value for x in cookies.cookiejar if x.name == 'csrftoken'][0]
    except IndexError:
        return False, "no csrftoken"

    params = dict(username=username, password=password,
        this_is_the_login_form=True,
        csrfmiddlewaretoken=token,
         )
    encoded_params = urllib.urlencode(params)

    with contextlib.closing(opener.open(login_url, encoded_params)) as f:
        html = f.read()

        print html
        # we're in.

req.add_header( 'Referer', login_url )