LinkedIn API: Get User Information

For any API call to the Linkedin API, you will need to have your user URN at hand. In the next script, we will learn how to query your user information using the LinkedIn API.

This post is part of the complete guide on how to use the LinkedIn API with Python

It will be used to get the LinkedIn user ID. The user ID will be used to generate the urn needed to publish content using the API.

This query will return a dictionary like this:

{
    'localizedLastName': 'Chouinard',
    'profilePicture': {
        'displayImage': 'urn:li:digitalmediaAsset:XXXXXXX'
    },
    'firstName': {
        'localized': {
            'fr_FR': 'Jean-Christophe',
            'en_US': 'Jean-Christophe'
            },
        'preferredLocale': {
            'country': 'US', 'language': 'en'
            }
        },
    'lastName': {
        'localized': {
            'fr_FR': 'Chouinard', 'en_US': 'Chouinard'
            },
        'preferredLocale': {
            'country': 'US', 'language': 'en'
            }
        },
    'id': 'XXXXXXXX',
    'localizedFirstName': 'Jean-Christophe'
}

Import Packages

Let’s install requests and import it.

$ pip install requests

import requests

Then, we will need to import the auth() and headers() functions from the ln_oauth module we created in the post to authenticate to the LinkedIn API using the OAuth 2.0.

from ln_oauth import auth, headers

Make the Request

Make a GET request to the Profile API using the https://api.linkedin.com/v2/me url. We will need to pass the headers to the function using the headers() function from ln_oauth.

def user_info(headers):
    '''
    Get user information from Linkedin
    '''
    response = requests.get('https://api.linkedin.com/v2/me', headers = headers)
    user_info = response.json()
    return user_info

Authorize the API

Now it is time to authorize the API.

credentials = 'credentials.json'
access_token = auth(credentials) # Authenticate the API

If you don’t know how to get the credentials, just read the post on how to get your LinkedIn OAuth credentials.

Create the Headers

The headers() function from ln_oauth.py will create the headers to pass to the GET request to authorize the API call.

The headers have this structure:

{'Authorization': 'Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>',
 'cache-control': 'no-cache',
 'X-Restli-Protocol-Version': '2.0.0'}

Run the Code

if __name__ == '__main__':
    credentials = 'credentials.json'
    access_token = auth(credentials) # Authenticate the API
    headers = headers(access_token) # Make the headers to attach to the API call.
    user_info = user_info(headers) # Get user info
    print(user_info)

The if name equals main line checks whether you are running the module or importing it. If you are importing it, user_info() will not run.

Full Code

import requests

from ln_oauth import auth, headers

def user_info(headers):
    '''
    Get user information from Linkedin
    '''
    response = requests.get('https://api.linkedin.com/v2/me', headers = headers)
    user_info = response.json()
    return user_info

if __name__ == '__main__':
    credentials = 'credentials.json'
    access_token = auth(credentials) # Authenticate the API
    headers = headers(access_token) # Make the headers to attach to the API call.
    user_info = user_info(headers) # Get user info
    print(user_info)

Troubleshooting

If this does not work, you might have a problem with your access token permissions. In that case, you can find out by using the Token Inspector.

That’s it, you now have extracted your user information using the LinkedIn API and Python.

The next step is to learn How to post on the LinkedIn API with Python.

5/5 - (2 votes)

Jean-Christophe Chouinard

SEO Strategist at Tripadvisor, ex- Seek (Melbourne, Australia). Specialized in technical SEO. Writer in Python, Information Retrieval, SEO and machine learning. Guest author at SearchEngineJournal, SearchEngineLand and OnCrawl.