Authentication#

Warning

Live timing data from livetiming.formula1.com requires an F1 account with an active F1TV subscription. Without it, season indexes, session archives, and the live stream are refused.

LiveF1 asks for your account email and password (or reads them from a .env file) and signs in for you. The password is saved only in that .env file. The token file holds the subscription token, not the password.

Calendar and championship data from Jolpica does not need an F1TV account. Timing, telemetry, and the real-time client do.

Formula 1 live timing data requires an F1 account with an active F1TV subscription. LiveF1 signs in with your account email and password and sends the resulting subscription token with every request to livetiming.formula1.com, both for historical (static) data and for the real-time client.

Signing in#

import livef1

livef1.login()

login() looks for credentials in this order:

  1. The username and password arguments.

  2. The F1_USERNAME and F1_PASSWORD environment variables.

  3. The same variables in a .env file. By default this is the first .env found in the current working directory or one of its parents, so a notebook in project/notebooks/ uses project/.env. If there is no .env, it is created in the current working directory when values are saved.

    F1_USERNAME='you@example.com'
F1_PASSWORD='your-password'

  4. An interactive prompt. After a successful sign-in, the entered values are saved to the .env file, readable by your user only. Keep this file out of version control.

If no credentials are available and the session is not interactive, an AuthenticationError is raised.

You do not have to call login() yourself: when live timing rejects a request, LiveF1 signs in once and retries it.

Reusing the token#

The token is saved to ~/.livef1/f1tv_auth_token.json and reused until it expires, so you are not signed in again on every run.

# Sign in again even if a valid token is saved
livef1.login(force=True)

# Keep the token in memory only
livef1.login(save_token=False)

# Save the token somewhere else (remembered in .env, see below)
livef1.login(token_path="/path/to/token.json")

# Read and save credentials in another .env file
livef1.login(env_path="/path/to/.env")

# Delete the saved token (the .env file is kept)
livef1.logout()

To set these options once for all sign-ins, including the automatic ones, use livef1.configure():

livef1.configure(
    auth_save_token=True,
    auth_token_path="/path/to/token.json",
    auth_env_path="/path/to/.env",
)

Remembering the token path#

When you pass token_path to login(), its absolute path is saved as LIVEF1_TOKEN_PATH in the .env file. Later runs then find the token there, even without calling login():

LIVEF1_TOKEN_PATH='/path/to/token.json'

You can also set LIVEF1_TOKEN_PATH yourself, in .env or as an environment variable. The token path is chosen in this order:

  1. The token_path argument.

  2. livef1.configure(auth_token_path=...).

  3. LIVEF1_TOKEN_PATH in the environment.

  4. LIVEF1_TOKEN_PATH in the .env file.

  5. ~/.livef1/f1tv_auth_token.json.

The path is not saved when save_token=False or when the sign-in fails.

Overriding the sign-in configuration#

The OAuth client ID and policy ID are read from the F1 account website. If F1 changes the website before LiveF1 is updated, set LIVEF1_F1_CLIENT_ID and LIVEF1_F1_POLICY_ID to override them.