I’m trying to automate updating my LinkedIn profile using Python. I’ve successfully logged in using Selenium, and now I’m attempting to use the requests library to submit form data for just the “About” section. However, I’m consistently getting a 403 Forbidden error when attempting to submit the form.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

Login with Selenium:
I can successfully log in to LinkedIn using Selenium and navigate to my profile page.

Extract Cookies and CSRF Token:
I extracted cookies from the Selenium session and obtain the CSRF token from the profile page’s HTML.

Submit Form Data with Requests:
I attempted to submit the “About” section form data using the requests library, including cookies and the CSRF token.

But no matter what I change, I keep receiving a 403 Forbidden response.

My code:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
import requests
import json
import re

username = 'my_username'
password = 'my_password'
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
# options.add_argument('--headless')  # for headless mode
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install()))

def get_cookies(driver):
    return {cookie['name']: cookie['value'] for cookie in driver.get_cookies()}

def extract_csrf_token(html):
    match = re.search(r'name="csrfToken" content="(.*?)"', html)
    return match.group(1) if match else None

def about(session, link, val, csrf_token, headers):
    summary_field_name = 'gai-text-form-component-profileEditFormElement-SUMMARY-profile-ACoAAE9YpSsBDmNZhmxG3ss87KP-i8rqiD6k-gM-summary'
    data = {
        summary_field_name: val,
        'save_button_name': 'Save',
        'csrfToken': csrf_token  
    }
    response = session.post(link, data=data, headers=headers)
    if response.status_code == 200:
        print("Form submitted successfully!")
    else:
        print(f"Failed to submit form: {response.status_code}")
        print(response.text)

try:
    driver.get('https://www.linkedin.com/login')
    username_field = driver.find_element(By.ID, 'username')
    username_field.send_keys(username)

    password_field = driver.find_element(By.ID, 'password')
    password_field.send_keys(password)

    password_field.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

    WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
        EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, '//a[@class="ember-view block"]'))
    ).click()

    profile_page = driver.current_url
    driver.get(profile_page)
    
    csrf_token = extract_csrf_token(driver.page_source)

    base = "https://www.linkedin.com/in/timmy-scrown-a6399b311/edit/forms/{}/new/?profileFormEntryPoint=PROFILE_COMPLETION_HUB"
    cookies = driver.get_cookies()
    session = requests.Session()

    for cookie in cookies:
        session.cookies.set(cookie['name'], cookie['value'])

    headers = {
        'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36',
        'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
        'Referer': profile_page,
        'X-CSRF-Token': csrf_token,
        'X-Requested-With': 'XMLHttpRequest'
    }

    sections = {
        "about": "summary",
        "education": "education",
        "positions": "position",
        "career_break": "career-break",
        "skills": "skills",
        "certifications": "certification",
        "projects": "project",
        "courses": "course",
        "volunteer_experience": "volunteer-experience",
        "publications": "publication",
        "patents": "patent",
        "honors_awards": "honor",
        "languages": "language",
        "organizations": "organization",
        "test_scores": "test-score",
        "causes": "causes"
    }

    functions = {
        "about": about,
        "education": education,
        "positions": positions,
        "career_break": career_break,
        "skills": skills,
        "certifications": certifications,
        "projects": projects,
        "courses": courses,
        "volunteer_experience": volunteer_experience,
        "publications": publications,
        "patents": patents,
        "honors_awards": honors_awards,
        "languages": languages,
        "organizations": organizations,
        "test_scores": test_scores,
        "causes": causes
    }

    with open('core.json', 'r') as file:
        data = json.load(file)

    for key, value in data.items():
        if key in functions:
            link = base.format(sections[key])
            functions[key](session, link, value, csrf_token, headers)
            print(link, key, value)

finally:
    driver.quit()

core.json

{
  "about": "Experienced software engineer with a passion for developing innovative programs.",
  "education": [
    {
      "school": "University of Technology",
      "degree": "Bachelor of Science in Computer Science",
      "field_of_study": "Computer Science",
      "start_year": "2016",
      "end_year": "2020"
    }
  ],
  "positions": [
    {
      "title": "Senior Developer",
      "company": "TechCorp",
      "location": "New York, NY",
      "start_month": "January",
      "start_year": "2021",
      "end_month": "Present",
      "description": "Leading a team of developers to create innovative software solutions."
    }
  ],
  "skills": ["Python", "Java", "JavaScript"],
  "certifications": [
    {
      "name": "Certified Java Developer",
      "issuing_organization": "Oracle",
      "issue_date": "2021-06"
    }
  ]
}

My Error

Failed to submit form: 403
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <title>Unauthorized</title>
        <style>
            html, body, pre {
                margin: 0;
                padding: 0;
                font-family: Monaco, 'Lucida Console', monospace;
                background: #ECECEC;
            }
            h1 {
                margin: 0;
                background: #333;
                padding: 20px 45px;
                color: #fff;
                text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,.3);
                border-bottom: 1px solid #111;
                font-size: 28px;
            }
            p#detail {
                margin: 0;
                padding: 15px 45px;
                background: #888;
                border-top: 4px solid #666;
                color: #111;
                text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px rgba(255,255,255,.3);
                font-size: 14px;
                border-bottom: 1px solid #333;
            }
        </style>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Unauthorized</h1>
        <p id="detail">
            You must be authenticated to access this page.
        </p>
    </body>
</html>