python requests file upload

If upload_file is meant to be the file, use:

files = {'upload_file': open('file.txt','rb')}
values = {'DB': 'photcat', 'OUT': 'csv', 'SHORT': 'short'}

r = requests.post(url, files=files, data=values)

and requests will send a multi-part form POST body with the upload_file field set to the contents of the file.txt file.

The filename will be included in the mime header for the specific field:

>>> import requests
>>> open('file.txt', 'wb')  # create an empty demo file
<_io.BufferedWriter name='file.txt'>
>>> files = {'upload_file': open('file.txt', 'rb')}
>>> print(requests.Request('POST', 'http://example.com', files=files).prepare().body.decode('ascii'))
--c226ce13d09842658ffbd31e0563c6bd
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="upload_file"; filename="file.txt"


--c226ce13d09842658ffbd31e0563c6bd--

Note the filename="file.txt" parameter.

You can use a tuple for the files mapping value, with between 2 and 4 elements, if you need more control. The first element is the filename, followed by the contents, and an optional content-type header value and an optional mapping of additional headers:

files = {'upload_file': ('foobar.txt', open('file.txt','rb'), 'text/x-spam')}

This sets an alternative filename and content type, leaving out the optional headers.

If you are meaning the whole POST body to be taken from a file (with no other fields specified), then don't use the files parameter, just post the file directly as data. You then may want to set a Content-Type header too, as none will be set otherwise. See Python requests - POST data from a file.

(2018) the new python requests library has simplified this process, we can use the 'files' variable to signal that we want to upload a multipart-encoded file

url = 'http://httpbin.org/post'
files = {'file': open('report.xls', 'rb')}

r = requests.post(url, files=files)
r.text

Client Upload

If you want to upload a single file with Python requests library, then requests lib supports streaming uploads, which allow you to send large files or streams without reading into memory.

with open('massive-body', 'rb') as f:
    requests.post('http://some.url/streamed', data=f)

Server Side

Then store the file on the server.py side such that save the stream into file without loading into the memory. Following is an example with using Flask file uploads.

@app.route("/upload", methods=['POST'])
def upload_file():
    from werkzeug.datastructures import FileStorage
    FileStorage(request.stream).save(os.path.join(app.config['UPLOAD_FOLDER'], filename))
    return 'OK', 200

Or use werkzeug Form Data Parsing as mentioned in a fix for the issue of "large file uploads eating up memory" in order to avoid using memory inefficiently on large files upload (s.t. 22 GiB file in ~60 seconds. Memory usage is constant at about 13 MiB.).

@app.route("/upload", methods=['POST'])
def upload_file():
    def custom_stream_factory(total_content_length, filename, content_type, content_length=None):
        import tempfile
        tmpfile = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile('wb+', prefix='flaskapp', suffix='.nc')
        app.logger.info("start receiving file ... filename => " + str(tmpfile.name))
        return tmpfile

    import werkzeug, flask
    stream, form, files = werkzeug.formparser.parse_form_data(flask.request.environ, stream_factory=custom_stream_factory)
    for fil in files.values():
        app.logger.info(" ".join(["saved form name", fil.name, "submitted as", fil.filename, "to temporary file", fil.stream.name]))
        # Do whatever with stored file at `fil.stream.name`
    return 'OK', 200