How to get POSTed JSON in Flask?

I'm trying to build a simple API using Flask, in which I now want to read some POSTed JSON. I do the POST with the Postman Chrome extension, and the JSON I POST is simply {"text":"lalala"}. I try to read the JSON using the following method:

@app.route('/api/add_message/<uuid>', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def add_message(uuid):
    content = request.json
    print content
    return uuid

On the browser it correctly returns the UUID I put in the GET, but on the console, it just prints out None (where I expect it to print out the {"text":"lalala"}. Does anybody know how I can get the posted JSON from within the Flask method?

First of all, the .json attribute is a property that delegates to the request.get_json() method, which documents why you see None here.

You need to set the request content type to application/json for the .json property and .get_json() method (with no arguments) to work as either will produce None otherwise. See the Flask Request documentation:

> This will contain the parsed JSON data if the mimetype indicates JSON (application/json, see is_json()), otherwise it will be None.

You can tell request.get_json() to skip the content type requirement by passing it the force=True keyword argument.

Note that if an exception is raised at this point (possibly resulting in a 400 Bad Request response), your JSON data is invalid. It is in some way malformed; you may want to check it with a JSON validator.

For reference, here's complete code for how to send json from a Python client:

import requests
res = requests.post('http://localhost:5000/api/add_message/1234', json={"mytext":"lalala"})
if res.ok:
    print(res.json())

The "json=" input will automatically set the content-type, as discussed here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9733638/post-json-using-python-requests

And the above client will work with this server-side code:

from flask import Flask, request, jsonify
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/api/add_message/<uuid>', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def add_message(uuid):
    content = request.json
    print(content['mytext'])
    return jsonify({"uuid":uuid})

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(host= '0.0.0.0',debug=True)

This is the way I would do it and it should be

@app.route('/api/add_message/<uuid>', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def add_message(uuid):
    content = request.get_json(silent=True)
    # print(content) # Do your processing
    return uuid

With silent=True set, the get_json function will fail silently when trying to retrieve the json body. By default this is set to False. If you are always expecting a json body (not optionally), leave it as silent=False.

Setting force=True will ignore the request.headers.get('Content-Type') == 'application/json' check that flask does for you. By default this is also set to False.

See flask documentation.

I would strongly recommend leaving force=False and make the client send the Content-Type header to make it more explicit.

Hope this helps!

Assuming you've posted valid JSON with the application/json content type, request.json will have the parsed JSON data.

from flask import Flask, request, jsonify

app = Flask(__name__)


@app.route('/echo', methods=['POST'])
def hello():
   return jsonify(request.json)

For all those whose issue was from the ajax call, here is a full example :

Ajax call : the key here is to use a dict and then JSON.stringify

    var dict = {username : "username" , password:"password"};

   	$.ajax({
		type: "POST", 
		url: "http://127.0.0.1:5000/", //localhost Flask
		data : JSON.stringify(dict),
		contentType: "application/json",
	});

And on server side :

from flask import Flask
from flask import request
import json

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/",  methods = ['POST'])
def hello():
    print(request.get_json())
    return json.dumps({'success':True}), 200, {'ContentType':'application/json'} 

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run()

You may note that request.json or request.get_json() works only when the Content-type: application/json has been added in the header of the request. If you are unable to change the client request configuration, so you can get the body as json like this:

data = json.loads(request.data)

To give another approach.

from flask import Flask, jsonify, request
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/service', methods=['POST'])
def service():
    data = json.loads(request.data)
    text = data.get("text",None)
    if text is None:
        return jsonify({"message":"text not found"})
    else:
        return jsonify(data)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(host= '0.0.0.0',debug=True)

If you use force=True, it will ignore the content type of the request and try to parse the body as JSON regardless.

request.get_json(force=True)

Assuming that you have posted valid JSON,

@app.route('/api/add_message/<uuid>', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def add_message(uuid):
    content = request.json
    print content['uuid']
    # Return data as JSON
    return jsonify(content)

The following codes can be used：

@app.route('/api/add_message/<uuid>', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def add_message(uuid):
  content = request.json['text']
  print content
  return uuid

Here is a screenshot of me getting the json data:

You can see that what is returned is a dictionary type of data.

Even though all the answers I encounter here are right. There is something that I think it should be done as better practice. Here is how I would write it.

from flask import app, request, Flask, jsonify


@app.route('/api/add_message/<uuid>', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def add_message(uuid):
    
    # Check if the request method is POST
    if request.method == 'POST':
        # content will return eather parse data as JSON
        # Or None incase there is no data
        content = request.get_json()
        print(content)
        # The content could be displayed in html page if serialized as json
        return jsonify(content) # Return null if there is content

    # if it is only get request then just return uuid
    return uuid

Try to set force attribute as True in get_json() method to resolve this issue.

request.get_json(force = True)