Download and set a random wallpaper on Mac OSX Mavericks

random-wallpaper.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
Sets a random wallpaper on Mac OSX Mavericks.
The wallpaper is fetched from interfacelift's random page for Retina resolution
"""
import urllib2
import re
import os

# We need to pretend we are Chrome, otherwise HTTP 403 Forbidden is thrown
HEADERS={'User-Agent': "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1667.0 Safari/537.36"}
# Set this to your resolution's random page
URL='http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper/downloads/random/widescreen/5120x2880/'


def fetch_random_wallpaper(filename):
    r = urllib2.Request(URL, headers=HEADERS)
    response = urllib2.urlopen(r).read()

    match = re.search("<a\s+href=['\"](/wallpaper/[^'\"]*?\.jpg)['\"]", response)
    wallpaper_url = match.group(1)
    wallpaper_url = ''.join(['http://www.interfacelift.com', wallpaper_url])

    wallpaper_request = urllib2.Request(wallpaper_url, headers=HEADERS)
    wallpaper_response = urllib2.urlopen(wallpaper_request).read()

    with open(filename, 'w') as f:
        f.write(wallpaper_response)

def set_as_wallpaper(filename):
    # From: http://derflounder.wordpress.com/2013/10/26/mavericks-desktop-background-picture-settings-moved-from-librarypreferencescom-apple-desktop-plist/

     full_path = os.path.abspath(filename)
     cmd = 'osascript -e "tell application \\"System Events\\" to set picture of every desktop to \\"{0}\\""'.format(full_path)
     os.system(cmd)
     # This seems to be necessary
     os.system('killall Dock')

def main(filename):
    fetch_random_wallpaper(filename)
    set_as_wallpaper(filename)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys

    if len(sys.argv) >= 2:
        filename_ = sys.argv[1]
    else:
        filename_ = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'wallpaper.jpg')

    main(filename_)