Automating Campus Network Login and Wi‑Fi Connection on macOS with Python

The article begins with a personal note about acquiring a MacBook and the desire to automate the cumbersome campus network login process that normally requires a browser login popup.

1. Implementation principle – By using the HTTP protocol, the script locates the login page URL, sends a POST request with the required credentials, and receives a successful login response.

1.1 Understanding URL – A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) follows the format protocol://username:[email protected]:port/path/file?param=value#fragment . Parts such as username, password, and query parameters can be omitted depending on the request.

1.2 HTTP request message format – The request consists of a start line ( method URL version ), headers (key: value pairs separated by newlines), a blank line, and an optional body. Common headers include Content-Type , Content-Length , Host , User-Agent , etc.

1.3 HTTP response header format – The response starts with version status_code reason_phrase , followed by headers and an optional body containing the returned HTML page.

2. Concrete implementation

First, install the requests library (if not already present) with pip3 install requests . Then use the following Python code to obtain the local IP address and send the login request:

import requests
import socket

def get_host_ip():
    """Query the machine's IP address"""
    try:
        s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
        s.connect(('10.255.255.255', 1))
        ip = s.getsockname()[0]
    finally:
        s.close()
    return ip

user_ip = get_host_ip()
post_addr = "http://10.10.244.11:801/eportal/"
post_header = {
    'Accept': '*/*',
    'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate',
    'Accept-Language': 'zh-CN,zh;q=0.9',
    'Cache-Control': 'max-age=0',
    'Connection': 'keep-alive',
    'Host': '10.10.244.11',
    'Referer': 'http://10.10.244.11/',
    'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests': '1',
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/101.0.4951.64 Safari/537.36'
}
post_data = {
    'c': 'ACSetting',
    'a': 'Login',
    'DDDDD': 'xxxx',
    'upass': 'xxxxx',
    'protocol': 'http:',
    'hostname': '10.10.244.11',
    'iTermType': '1',
    'wlanuserip': user_ip,
    'wlanacip': 'xxxxxx',
    'wlanacname': 'SPL-BRAS-SR8806-X',
    'mac': '00-00-00-00-00-00',
    'ip': user_ip,
    'enAdvert': '0',
    'queryACIP': '0',
    'loginMethod': '1'
}

z = requests.post(post_addr, data=post_data, headers=post_header)
print("登录校园网成功，局域网ip如下：")
print(user_ip)

To automate Wi‑Fi connection, install pywifi (note that the original package does not support macOS, so a macOS‑compatible fork from GitHub must be used). After cloning the fork, replace the original package files with the macOS version.

pip3 install pywifi
# Clone macOS‑compatible fork
git clone -b macos_dev https://github.com/awkman/pywifi.git
# Replace the package directory (example path)
cp -r pywifi /Users/yourname/Library/Python/3.8/lib/python/site-packages
pip3 install pyobjc  # required dependency for macOS

Use the following script to check Wi‑Fi status, scan available networks, and connect to the campus Wi‑Fi (SSID "NJUPT-CMCC") without a password:

import pywifi, time
from pywifi import const

def wifi_connect_status():
    wifi = pywifi.PyWiFi()
    iface = wifi.interfaces()[0]
    if iface.status() in [const.IFACE_CONNECTED, const.IFACE_INACTIVE]:
        return 1
    else:
        print("Please enable Wi‑Fi manually.")
        return 0

def scan_wifi():
    wifi = pywifi.PyWiFi()
    iface = wifi.interfaces()[0]
    iface.scan()
    time.sleep(1)
    return iface.scan_results()

def connect_wifi():
    wifi = pywifi.PyWiFi()
    iface = wifi.interfaces()[0]
    iface.disconnect()
    time.sleep(3)
    profile = pywifi.Profile()
    profile.ssid = "NJUPT-CMCC"
    iface.remove_all_network_profiles()
    tmp_profile = iface.add_network_profile(profile)
    iface.connect(tmp_profile)
    time.sleep(1)
    if iface.status() == const.IFACE_CONNECTED:
        print("连接校园网成功")
        return True
    else:
        print("连接校园网失败")
        return False

Finally, package the whole script into a Windows executable using pyinstaller :

pip3 install pyinstaller
/Users/yourname/Library/Python/3.8/bin/pyinstaller -F your_script.py

The command creates a dist folder containing the .exe file, completing the automation workflow.