What it does

Gets a cookie and crumb tokens for Yahoo Finance API data. Once you have these, you can reuse them in your requests without restriction.

Usage

1. Run install-phantomjs.sh to install phantomjs in current directory:

    ./install-phantomjs.sh
   

2. Run fetchtoken.sh to fetch API tokens:

    ./fetchtoken.sh
   

You should see something like this:

Fetch url https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/^GSPC/history?p=^GSPC
status: success
title: ^GSPC Historical Prices | S&P 500 Stock - Yahoo Finance
csv url: https://query1.finance.yahoo.com/v7/finance/download/^GSPC?period1=1492463852&period2=1495055852&interval=1d&events=history&crumb=XXXXXXX
crumb: XXXXXXX
cookie: B=YYYYYY

Sometimes the script doesn't work and instead prints weird phantomjs debug info. Try adjusting the user agent and sleep values.

When it works, you can download historical data with a request like this:

    curl 'https://query1.finance.yahoo.com/v7/finance/download/%5EGSPC?period1=1492463852&period2=1495055852&interval=1d&events=history&crumb=XXXXXXX' -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; Trident/6.0)' -H 'cookie: B=YYYYYY;' -H 'referer: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EGSPC/history?p=%5EGSPC'

replace the cookie and crumb values with the ones from the script. period1 (start) and period2 (end) are dates in unix timestamp format.

You can also do the same thing in the Chrome dev tools inspector: just find the request in the Network tab. The crumb / cookie values are reusable.