Making a request to a RESTful API using python

I have a RESTful API that I have exposed using an implementation of Elasticsearch on an EC2 instance to index a corpus of content. I can query the search by running the following from my terminal (MacOSX):

curl -XGET 'http://ES_search_demo.com/document/record/_search?pretty=true' -d '{
  "query": {
    "bool": {
      "must": [
        {
          "text": {
            "record.document": "SOME_JOURNAL"
          }
        },
        {
          "text": {
            "record.articleTitle": "farmers"
          }
        }
      ],
      "must_not": [],
      "should": []
    }
  },
  "from": 0,
  "size": 50,
  "sort": [],
  "facets": {}
}'

How do I turn above into a API request using python/requests or python/urllib2 (not sure which one to go for - have been using urllib2, but hear that requests is better...)? Do I pass as a header or otherwise?

Using requests:

import requests
url = 'http://ES_search_demo.com/document/record/_search?pretty=true'
data = '''{
  "query": {
    "bool": {
      "must": [
        {
          "text": {
            "record.document": "SOME_JOURNAL"
          }
        },
        {
          "text": {
            "record.articleTitle": "farmers"
          }
        }
      ],
      "must_not": [],
      "should": []
    }
  },
  "from": 0,
  "size": 50,
  "sort": [],
  "facets": {}
}'''
response = requests.post(url, data=data)

Depending on what kind of response your API returns, you will then probably want to look at response.text or response.json() (or possibly inspect response.status_code first). See the quickstart docs here, especially this section.

Using requests and json makes it simple.

1. Call the API
2. Assuming the API returns a JSON, parse the JSON object into a Python dict using json.loads function
3. Loop through the dict to extract information.

Requests module provides you useful function to loop for success and failure.

if(Response.ok): will help help you determine if your API call is successful (Response code - 200)

Response.raise_for_status() will help you fetch the http code that is returned from the API.

Below is a sample code for making such API calls. Also can be found in [github] 3. The code assumes that the API makes use of digest authentication. You can either skip this or use other appropriate authentication modules to authenticate the client invoking the API.

#Python 2.7.6
#RestfulClient.py

import requests
from requests.auth import HTTPDigestAuth
import json

# Replace with the correct URL
url = "http://api_url"

# It is a good practice not to hardcode the credentials. So ask the user to enter credentials at runtime
myResponse = requests.get(url,auth=HTTPDigestAuth(raw_input("username: "), raw_input("Password: ")), verify=True)
#print (myResponse.status_code)

# For successful API call, response code will be 200 (OK)
if(myResponse.ok):

	# Loading the response data into a dict variable
	# json.loads takes in only binary or string variables so using content to fetch binary content
	# Loads (Load String) takes a Json file and converts into python data structure (dict or list, depending on JSON)
	jData = json.loads(myResponse.content)
	
	print("The response contains {0} properties".format(len(jData)))
	print("\n")
	for key in jData:
		print key + " : " + jData[key]
else:
  # If response code is not ok (200), print the resulting http error code with description
	myResponse.raise_for_status()

So you want to pass data in body of a GET request, better would be to do it in POST call. You can achieve this by using both Requests.

Raw Request

GET http://ES_search_demo.com/document/record/_search?pretty=true HTTP/1.1
Host: ES_search_demo.com
Content-Length: 183
User-Agent: python-requests/2.9.0
Connection: keep-alive
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

{
  "query": {
    "bool": {
      "must": [
        {
          "text": {
            "record.document": "SOME_JOURNAL"
          }
        },
        {
          "text": {
            "record.articleTitle": "farmers"
          }
        }
      ],
      "must_not": [],
      "should": []
    }
  },
  "from": 0,
  "size": 50,
  "sort": [],
  "facets": {}
}

Sample call with Requests

import requests

def consumeGETRequestSync():
data = '{
  "query": {
    "bool": {
      "must": [
        {
          "text": {
            "record.document": "SOME_JOURNAL"
          }
        },
        {
          "text": {
            "record.articleTitle": "farmers"
          }
        }
      ],
      "must_not": [],
      "should": []
    }
  },
  "from": 0,
  "size": 50,
  "sort": [],
  "facets": {}
}'
url = 'http://ES_search_demo.com/document/record/_search?pretty=true'
headers = {"Accept": "application/json"}
# call get service with headers and params
response = requests.get(url,data = data)
print "code:"+ str(response.status_code)
print "******************"
print "headers:"+ str(response.headers)
print "******************"
print "content:"+ str(response.text)

consumeGETRequestSync()

Below is the program to execute the rest api in python-

import requests
url = 'https://url'
data = '{  "platform": {    "login": {      "userName": "name",      "password": "pwd"    }  } }'
response = requests.post(url, data=data,headers={"Content-Type": "application/json"})
print(response)
sid=response.json()['platform']['login']['sessionId']   //to extract the detail from response
print(response.text)
print(sid)