I need to upload some data to a server using HTTP PUT in python. From my brief reading of the urllib2 docs, it only does HTTP POST. Is there any way to do an HTTP PUT in python?

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': 'bob@bob.com'}
>>> 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 should have a look at the httplib module. It should let you make whatever sort of HTTP request you want.

I needed to solve this problem too a while back so that I could act as a client for a RESTful API. I settled on httplib2 because it allowed me to send PUT and DELETE in addition to GET and POST. Httplib2 is not part of the standard library but you can easily get it from the cheese shop.

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)

I also recommend httplib2 by Joe Gregario. I use this regularly instead of httplib in the standard lib.

Have you taken a look at put.py? I’ve used it in the past. You can also just hack up your own request with urllib.

You can of course roll your own with the existing standard libraries at any level from sockets up to tweaking urllib.

http://pycurl.sourceforge.net/

“PyCurl is a Python interface to libcurl.”

“libcurl is a free and easy-to-use client-side URL transfer library, … supports … HTTP PUT”

“The main drawback with PycURL is that it is a relative thin layer over libcurl without any of those nice Pythonic class hierarchies. This means it has a somewhat steep learning curve unless you are already familiar with libcurl’s C API. “

If you want to stay within the standard library, you can subclass urllib2.Request:

import urllib2

class RequestWithMethod(urllib2.Request):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self._method = kwargs.pop('method', None)
        urllib2.Request.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)

    def get_method(self):
        return self._method if self._method else super(RequestWithMethod, self).get_method()


def put_request(url, data):
    opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPHandler)
    request = RequestWithMethod(url, method='PUT', data=data)
    return opener.open(request)

A more proper way of doing this with requests would be:

import requests

payload = {'username': 'bob', 'email': 'bob@bob.com'}

try:
    response = requests.put(url="http://somedomain.org/endpoint", data=payload)
    response.raise_for_status()
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
    print(e)
    raise

This raises an exception if there is an error in the HTTP PUT request.