Unirest is a set of lightweight HTTP libraries available in multiple languages, built and maintained by Mashape, who also maintain the open-source API Gateway Kong.

• Make GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE requests
• Both syncronous and asynchronous (non-blocking) requests
• Supports form parameters, file uploads and custom body entities
• Supports gzip
• Supports Basic Authentication natively
• Customizable timeout
• Customizable default headers for every request (DRY)
• Automatic JSON parsing into a native object for JSON responses

To utilize Unirest, install it using pip:

$ pip install unirest

After installing the pip package, you can now begin simplifying requests by importing unirest:

import unirest

So you're probably wondering how using Unirest makes creating requests in Python easier, let's start with a working example:

response = unirest.post("https://httpbin.org/post", headers={ "Accept": "application/json" }, params={ "parameter": 23, "foo": "bar" })

response.code # The HTTP status code
response.headers # The HTTP headers
response.body # The parsed response
response.raw_body # The unparsed response

Python also supports asynchronous requests in which you can define a callback function to be passed along and invoked when Unirest receives the response:

def callback_function(response):
  response.code # The HTTP status code
  response.headers # The HTTP headers
  response.body # The parsed response
  response.raw_body # The unparsed response
  
thread = unirest.post("https://httpbin.org/post", headers={ "Accept": "application/json" }, params={ "parameter": 23, "foo": "bar" }, callback=callback_function)

Transferring file data requires that you open the file in a readable r mode:

response = unirest.post("https://httpbin.org/post", headers={"Accept": "application/json"},
  params={
    "parameter": "value",
    "file": open("/tmp/file", mode="r")
  }
)

import json

response = unirest.post("https://httpbin.org/post", headers={ "Accept": "application/json" },
  params=json.dumps({
    "parameter": "value",
    "foo": "bar"
  })
)

Note: For the sake of semplicity, even with custom entities in the body, the keyword argument is still params (instead of data for example). I'm looking for feedback on this.

Authenticating the request with basic authentication can be done by providing an auth array like:

response = unirest.get("https://httpbin.org/get", auth=('username', 'password'))

unirest.get(url, headers = {}, params = {}, auth = (), callback = None)
unirest.post(url, headers = {}, params = {}, auth = (), callback = None)
unirest.put(url, headers = {}, params = {}, auth = (), callback = None)
unirest.patch(url, headers = {}, params = {}, auth = (), callback = None)    
unirest.delete(url, headers = {}, params = {}, auth = (), callback = None)

• url - Endpoint, address, or URI to be acted upon and requested information from in a string format.
• headers - Request Headers as an associative array
• params - Request Body as an associative array or object
• auth - The Basic Authentication credentials as an array
• callback - Asychronous callback method to be invoked upon result.

Upon receiving a response, Unirest returns the result in the form of an Object. This object should always have the same keys for each language regarding to the response details.

• code - HTTP Response Status Code (Example 200)
• headers- HTTP Response Headers
• body- Parsed response body where applicable, for example JSON responses are parsed to Objects / Associative Arrays.
• raw_body- Un-parsed response body

You can set some advanced configuration to tune Unirest-Python:

You can set a custom timeout value (in seconds):

unirest.timeout(5) # 5s timeout

You can set default headers that will be sent on every request:

unirest.default_header('Header1','Value1')
unirest.default_header('Header2','Value2')

You can clear the default headers anytime with:

unirest.clear_default_headers()

Made with ♥ from the Mashape team