Is it possible to make POST request in Flask?

Question

There is a need to make POST request from server side in Flask.

Let's imagine that we have:

@app.route("/test", methods=["POST"]) def test():     test = request.form["test"]     return "TEST: %s" % test  @app.route("/index") def index():     # Is there something_like_this method in Flask to perform the POST request?     return something_like_this("/test", { "test" : "My Test Data" }) 

I haven't found anything specific in Flask documentation. Some say urllib2.urlopen is the issue but I failed to combine Flask and urlopen. Is it really possible?

Answer 1

For the record, here's general code to make a POST request from Python:

#make a POST request import requests dictToSend = {'question':'what is the answer?'} res = requests.post('http://localhost:5000/tests/endpoint', json=dictToSend) print 'response from server:',res.text dictFromServer = res.json() 

Notice that we are passing in a Python dict using the json= option. This conveniently tells the requests library to do two things:

1. serialize the dict to JSON
2. write the correct MIME type ('application/json') in the HTTP header

And here's a Flask application that will receive and respond to that POST request:

#handle a POST request from flask import Flask, render_template, request, url_for, jsonify app = Flask(__name__)  @app.route('/tests/endpoint', methods=['POST']) def my_test_endpoint():     input_json = request.get_json(force=True)      # force=True, above, is necessary if another developer      # forgot to set the MIME type to 'application/json'     print 'data from client:', input_json     dictToReturn = {'answer':42}     return jsonify(dictToReturn)  if __name__ == '__main__':     app.run(debug=True) 

Answer 2

Yes, to make a POST request you can use urllib, see the documentation.

I would however recommend to use the requests module instead.

EDIT:

I suggest you refactor your code to extract the common functionality:

@app.route("/test", methods=["POST"]) def test():     return _test(request.form["test"])  @app.route("/index") def index():     return _test("My Test Data")  def _test(argument):     return "TEST: %s" % argument