Make an http POST request to upload a file using Python urllib/urllib2

Question

I would like to make a POST request to upload a file to a web service (and get response) using Python. For example, I can do the following POST request with curl

Answer 1

Well, there are multiple ways to do it. As mentioned above, you can send the file in "multipart/form-data". However, the target service may not be expecting this type, in which case you may try some more approaches.

Pass the file object

urllib2 can accept a file object as data. When you pass this type, the library reads the file as a binary stream and sends it out. However, it will not set the proper Content-Type header. Moreover, if the Content-Length header is missing, then it will try to access the len property of the object, which doesn't exist for the files. That said, you must provide both the Content-Type and the Content-Length headers to have the method working:

import os
import urllib2

filename = '/var/tmp/myfile.zip'
headers = {
    'Content-Type': 'application/zip',
    'Content-Length': os.stat(filename).st_size,
}
request = urllib2.Request('http://localhost', open(filename, 'rb'),
                          headers=headers)
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)

Wrap the file object

To not deal with the length, you may create a simple wrapper object. With just a little change you can adapt it to get the content from a string if you have the file loaded in memory.

class BinaryFileObject:
  """Simple wrapper for a binary file for urllib2."""

  def __init__(self, filename):
    self.__size = int(os.stat(filename).st_size)
    self.__f = open(filename, 'rb')

  def read(self, blocksize):
    return self.__f.read(blocksize)

  def __len__(self):
    return self.__size

Encode the content as base64

Another way is encoding the data via base64.b64encode and providing Content-Transfer-Type: base64 header. However, this method requires support on the server side. Depending on the implementation, the service can either accept the file and store it incorrectly, or return HTTP 400. E.g. the GitHub API won't throw an error, but the uploaded file will be corrupted.