Uploading files to SharePoint with Python

So recently I had a project. The project was to get files that were uploaded to an SFTP server into a SharePoint document library.

The SFTP server was Linux based, this made things interesting. As Microsoft doesn't really supply an API for Linux Python, in particular. This means that you need to use the Sharepoint REST API. The REST API looked simple enough, but the authentication seems very difficult as you need to completely understand the login flow.

Microsoft has an API that "just works" for C# on .NET

But one problem I was using Linux.

Here is how I solved it

#!/usr/bin/python3
import os
import sys
import json
import sharepy
import time
import logging

def uploadToSharepoint(SPUrl, siteName, libraryName, FolderPath):
    #check is the session files exists
    if os.path.isfile("sp-session.pkl"):
        s = sharepy.load()
    else:
        s = sharepy.connect(SPUrl)
        s.save()
    #check is system is windows
    if os.name == 'nt':
        folder = FolderPath.split('\\')
    else:
        folder = FolderPath.split('/')
        print(folder)

    #check to see if the FolderPath is a directory
    if os.path.isdir(FolderPath):

        #creates the folder in sharepoint
        p = s.post("https://"+SPUrl+"/sites/"+siteName+"/_api/web/folders",
        json={
            "__metadata": { "type": "SP.Folder" },
            "ServerRelativeUrl": libraryName +'/' + folder[-2]
            })

        logging.info("Created Folder %s: with response %s", folder, p.content)

        filesToUpload = os.listdir(FolderPath)

        #uploads files to sharepoint
        for fileToUpload in filesToUpload:
            headers = {"accept": "application/json;odata=verbose",
            "content-type": "application/x-www-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8"}

            with open(os.path.join(FolderPath, fileToUpload), 'rb') as read_file:
                content = read_file.read()

            p = s.post(f"https://{SPUrl}/sites/{siteName}/_api/web/GetFolderByServerRelativeUrl('{libraryName}/{folder[-2]}')/Files/add(url='{fileToUpload}',overwrite=true)", data=content, headers=headers)

            logging.info("Uploaded %s: with response %s", folder, p.content)
            print(folder)

if __name__ == "__main__":

    SPUrl = "tenant.sharepoint.com"
    siteName = "Site1"
    libraryName = "library1"
    logging.basicConfig(filename="UploadedFiles.log",
                        level=logging.INFO,
                        format='%(asctime)s - %(message)s',
                        datefmt='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

    path = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) else '.'

    uploadToSharepoint(SPUrl, siteName, libraryName, path)

I found a lot of outdated librarys as Microsoft has changed the authentication flow for SharePoint online. However, I did manage to find a couple of good python libraries the most simple being SharePy you can view it on GitHub

This API looks like it sends SAML in a post request to https://login.microsoftonline.com/extSTS.srf which it then creates a "session" file, this file has all the cookies and sessions needed to keep authenticated with SharePoint.

So I already had an SFTP server configurated to CHROOT users.

so all I needed now was a way to watch a directory. My first thought was to use incron but it has a limitation in that it can not monitor the creation of folders and cannot monitor a folder recursively.

I then came across a python library called watchdog you can view this on GitHub.

Right, let's get into the code!

Christopher Caplan

AWS Certified Solutions Architect with more than 7 years experience in IT as an IT Support Technician/Devops Engineer. 4 of them years working with AWS. Specialising in AWS and Linux Infrastucture