Is there any way to do HTTP PUT in python

Question

I've used a variety of python HTTP libs in the past, and I've settled on 'Requests' as my favourite. Existing libs had pretty useable interfaces, but code can end up being a few lines too long for simple operations. A basic PUT in requests looks like:

payload = {'username': 'bob', 'email': '[email protected]'}
>>> r = requests.put("http://somedomain.org/endpoint", data=payload)

You can then check the response status code with:

r.status_code

or the response with:

r.content

Requests has a lot synactic sugar and shortcuts that'll make your life easier.

import urllib2
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPHandler)
request = urllib2.Request('http://example.org', data='your_put_data')
request.add_header('Content-Type', 'your/contenttype')
request.get_method = lambda: 'PUT'
url = opener.open(request)

Httplib seems like a cleaner choice.

import httplib
connection =  httplib.HTTPConnection('1.2.3.4:1234')
body_content = 'BODY CONTENT GOES HERE'
connection.request('PUT', '/url/path/to/put/to', body_content)
result = connection.getresponse()
# Now result.status and result.reason contains interesting stuff

You can use the requests library, it simplifies things a lot in comparison to taking the urllib2 approach. First install it from pip:

pip install requests

More on installing requests.

Then setup the put request:

import requests
import json
url = 'https://api.github.com/some/endpoint'
payload = {'some': 'data'}

# Create your header as required
headers = {"content-type": "application/json", "Authorization": "<auth-key>" }

r = requests.put(url, data=json.dumps(payload), headers=headers)

See the quickstart for requests library. I think this is a lot simpler than urllib2 but does require this additional package to be installed and imported.

This was made better in python3 and documented in the stdlib documentation

The urllib.request.Request class gained a method=... parameter in python3.

Some sample usage:

req = urllib.request.Request('https://example.com/', data=b'DATA!', method='PUT')
urllib.request.urlopen(req)