managing secrets with selenium webdriver

Question

I need to login to a webpage using selenium webdriver to download some PDFs, for this I need to use 2 sets of credentials that i need to pass as plaintext.

What would be the best way to do this without hardcoding the passwords?

i was hardcoding everything like this:

if __name__ == '__main__':
    ooffice=[SECRET EXPUNGED]
    luser=[SECRET EXPUNGED]
    lpassword=[SECRET EXPUNGED]
    muser=[SECRET EXPUNGED]
    mpassword=[SECRET EXPUNGED]
    logname="log.txt"
    today=datetime.datetime.now()
    with open(logname, 'a+') as f:
        f.write("{}: program started \n".format(datetime.datetime.now()))
    for i in range(3):
            try:
                with open(logname, 'a') as f:
                    f.write("{}: downloading first document, try:{} \n".format(datetime.datetime.now(),i+1))
                simpledownload(ooffice,luser,lpassword)
                break
            except Exception as Argument:
                with open(logname, 'a') as f:
                    f.write(str(Argument))
                    f.write("\n")
    for i in range(3):
            try:
                simpledownload(ooffice,muser,mpassword)
                with open(logname, 'a') as f:
                    f.write("{}: downloading second document, try:{} \n".format(datetime.datetime.now(),i+1))
                break
            except Exception as Argument:
                with open('output.txt', 'a') as f:
                    f.write(str(Argument))
                    f.write("\n")

Answer 1

you can use a separate configuration file or environment variables to store them. at first, you can create a file named 'config.ini' in the same directory as your script with the following contents.

[credentials]
luser = username1
lpassword = password1
muser = username2
mpassword = password2

then in your script, use the configparser module to read the credentials from the configuration file.

import configparser

config = configparser.ConfigParser()
config.read('config.ini')

luser = config['credentials']['luser']
lpassword = config['credentials']['lpassword']
muser = config['credentials']['muser']
mpassword = config['credentials']['mpassword']

now you can use the variables luser, lpassword, muser, and mpassword in your login code instead of hardcoding the values.

Answer 2

I sometimes will store passwords in text files & then read the text files for the password.

with open(pw_file_location, 'r') as fil:
    pw = fil.read()