How to create Wordpress articles via REST API

Table of Contents

Motivation

If you had less menial manual work you could sit at the beach and relax more often 🙂

So regarding my pain points I figured out that publishing articles to my blog takes a huge amount of time too.

In order to publish an article I need to:

Log in into the WordPress backend
Create a new post in the WordPress backend
Insert the markdown text for the article into the post (I write my articles in markdown and use github for versioning)
Convert the markdown format into HTML by pressing the enter key on every tag (sic!) (so that ## becomes h2)
Upload all media / images
Insert images into the post
Select the featured image
Write some SEO relevant metadata
Publish the post

Why not “Automate the boring stuff” here as well? In this part I will show you the first part of publishing a post.

Prerequisites

For uploading we use the requests module. So let’s install it via:

pip install requests

Application Password

As another prerequisites we need an application password:

Log in to your WordPress site with an admin user account
Navigate to Users > Profile.
Scroll down to the “Application Passwords” heading.
Enter an application name
Click “Add New Application Password”
Store the generated password in a secure place

Uploading Posts

data = {
    'title': 'Example wordpress post',
    'status': 'draft',
    'slug': 'example-wordpress-post',
    'author': 1,
    'content': '# H1 heading \n ## h2 heading'
}

This is the minimal data you have to provide to be able to create a post via API.
The author has to be an integer. You can find the users’ ids via https://<your_wordpress_site>/wp-json/wp/v2/users in your browser.

Authentication

For authentication you need a header:

WORDPRESS_CREDENTIALS = USER_NAME + ":" + APPLICATION_PASSWORD 
WORDPRESS_TOKEN = base64.b64encode(WORDPRESS_CREDENTIALS.encode()) 
WORDPRESS_HEADER = {'Authorization': 'Basic ' + WORDPRESS_TOKEN.decode('utf-8')}

USER_NAME has to be a real user with admin rights not the application password name (It got me confused)

Posting the Post

We use the REST API v2 which is located at:

WORDPRESS_API = "https://<your_wordpress_site>/wp-json/wp/v2"

The endpoint for uploading posts is

API_ENDPOINT = WORDPRESS_API + "/posts"

Now we have all information to finally post the post

def upload_post(data):
    response = requests.post(API_ENDPOINT, json=data, headers=WORDPRESS_HEADER)
    return response

Little helpers

Creating slugs

Normally the slug for a post is the title just with lowercase and hyphen instead of spaces
(That’s what the editor in the wp backend would normally do automatically)
So let’s do this programmatically as well:

def make_slug_from_title(title):
    slug = title.lower().replace(" ", "-")
    return slug

Converting from markdown to HTML

With the markdown package you can convert your article before uploading

pip install Markdown

html_text = markdown(article_content, output_format="html")

Just one line of additional code. I love Python!

Reading and Converting a markdown file

To create the data for the upload in one go I wrote a convenience function:

def get_article_data(folder):
    base_dir = '../content'
    article = os.path.join(base_dir, folder, folder + ".md")
    with open(article, "r") as f:
        title = f.readline().replace("#", "").strip()
        article_content = f.read()
    html_text = markdown(article_content, output_format="html")
    slug = make_slug_from_title(title)
    data = {
        'title': title,
        'status': 'draft',
        'slug': slug,
        'author': 1,
        'content': html_text,
    }
    return data

Putting it together

With these helpers you can condense it into

data = get_article_data(folder)
upload_post(data)

How to create WordPress articles via REST API