Teachable Scraper: Authentication & Session Establishment
Teachable Scraper: Authentication & Session Establishment
Available from: v1.0.14
The Teachable import pipeline begins with an authentication stage that logs into your Teachable school as an admin and establishes a persistent session. This session is used by all subsequent scraping steps — course discovery, lesson extraction, media collection, and attachment downloading — so no further credential handling is needed once this stage completes.
How It Works
1. Login Form Submission
The scraper navigates to your Teachable school's admin login endpoint and submits your credentials via Teachable's standard login form. This mimics the normal browser-based sign-in flow and returns an authenticated session on success.
2. Cookie-Based Session Capture
Once authenticated, Teachable responds with one or more session cookies. The scraper captures these cookies and stores them in a session context that is shared across the entire import pipeline.
3. Persistent Session Reuse
All subsequent HTTP requests made by the import pipeline — fetching course lists, lesson pages, embedded assets, and file attachments — automatically include the captured session cookies. This means:
- No repeated logins during a single import run.
- All requests are scoped to the authenticated admin user.
- Access to unpublished and private content is preserved throughout.
Requirements
| Requirement | Details |
|---|---|
| Teachable school URL | The root URL of the school to import from (e.g. https://yourschool.teachable.com) |
| Admin credentials | Email address and password of a user with admin privileges on the school |
| Admin-level access | Required to access all courses, including unpublished and private content |
Note: Owner or Admin role is required. Instructor or Student accounts will not have sufficient permissions to scrape the full course catalogue.
Pipeline Stages
Authentication is Stage 1 of the import pipeline. The full pipeline is being built incrementally across releases:
| Stage | Status | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Authentication | ✅ Available (v1.0.14) | Login and session establishment |
| 2. Course Structure | 🔜 Upcoming | Discover and extract course and section hierarchy |
| 3. Lesson Content | 🔜 Upcoming | Extract text, video links, and embedded media |
| 4. Assets & Attachments | 🔜 Upcoming | Download images and document attachments |
| 5. Content Reconstruction | 🔜 Upcoming | Rebuild content inside the platform |
Security Considerations
- Credentials are used solely to establish the session and are not stored beyond the scope of the import run.
- Session cookies are held in memory during the import and are not persisted to disk.
- It is recommended to use a dedicated admin account for import operations rather than a personal admin account.