Restclient

A helper library to make writing REST clients in python extremely simple. Specifically, while httplib2 and similar libraries are very efficient and powerful, doing something very simple like making a POST request to a url with a couple parameters can involve quite a bit of code. Restclient tries to make these common tasks simple. It does not try to do everything though. If you need to construct a request in a very particular way, are expecting a large result, or need better error handling, nothing is stopping you from using one of the lower level libraries directly for that.

Installation

If you have setuptools installed, just do "easy_install restclient"

Documentation

Restclient is very simple so the main documentation is in docstrings in the code itself. this page just serves as a quick starter.

from restclient import GET, POST, PUT, DELETE
r = GET("http://www.example.com/") # makes a GET request to the url. returns a string 
POST("http://www.example.com/") # makes a POST request
PUT("http://www.example.com/") # makes a PUT request
DELETE("http://www.example.com/") # makes a DELETE request
POST("http://www.example.com/",params={'foo' : 'bar'}) # passes params along
POST("http://www.example.com/",headers={'foo' : 'bar'}) # sends additional HTTP headers with the request
POST("http://www.example.com/",accept=['application/xml','text/plain']) # specify HTTP Accept: headers

Restclient also handles multipart file uploads nicely:

f = open("foo.txt").read()
POST("http://www.example.com/",files={'file1' : {'file' : f, 'filename' : 'foo.txt'}})

by default, POST(), PUT(), and DELETE() make their requests asynchronously. IE, they spawn a new thread to do the request and return immediately. GET() is synchronous. You can change this behavior with the 'async' parameter:

POST("http://www.example.com/",async=False) # will wait for the request to complete before returning

Doing an asynchronous GET would be silly and pointless so I won't give an example of that but I'm sure you could figure it out.

With any of those, if you add a return_resp=True argument, restclient will make the request like normal and then return the raw httplib2 response object. You'll have to extract the response body yourself, but you'll also have access to the HTTP response codes, etc. If you need finer grain control of the request, you are encouraged to just use httplib2 directly.

Download

Grab the egg from the cheeseshop.

Credits

written by Anders Pearson at the Columbia Center For New Media Teaching And Learning.