How do I make a PATCH request in Python?

Question

Is there a way to make a request using the PATCH HTTP method in Python?

I tried using httplib, but it doesn't accept PATCH as method param.

Accustom

Did you mean PUT? PUSH is not a valid request method for HTTP – Nisa

Check here, it uses PUT on that post, I guess you can use PUSH as a verb and wont give you trouble, still you should use PUT instead of PUSH – Aspa

Sorry, people, I typed the wrong method name, I edited the question o.O – Accustom

Cat Plus Plus: yes, there is a PATCH method. dave: PUSH is "valid". There's a difference between "valid" and "registered". – Doer

Cat Plus Plus: here about PATCH method innoq.com/blog/st/2010/03/rfc_5789_patch_method_for_http.html It's ironic that Google support and use it in APIs but GAE urlfetch doesn't work with it. – Accustom

salesforce.com REST API requires use of the PATCH method for updating objects, so I am looking for this too, so I can update objects from Google App Engine salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api_rest/index.htm – Masera

Answer 1

With Requests, making PATCH requests is very simple:

import requests

r = requests.patch('http://httpbin.org/patch')

Offload

How do I log r. Should I just do self.log.info('Response: %s' % r)? – Immunize

how can i pass string json data into this ? – Winner

@PrasaanthNeelakandan over here are better answers Post JSON using Python Requests – Waligore

Answer 2

Seems to work in 2.7.1 as well.

>>> import urllib2
>>> request = urllib2.Request('http://google.com')
>>> request.get_method = lambda: 'PATCH'
>>> resp = urllib2.urlopen(request)
Traceback (most recent call last):
 ...
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 405: Method Not Allowed

Convenance

Great information. This is a simple little hack to make urllib2 use PATCH instead of POST. I don't know why PATCH hasn't been implemented as an option yet. – Wingate

Answer 3

I tried this in Python 3, and it seemed to work (but I don't have a server handy that supports the PATCH request type):

>>> import http.client
>>> c = http.client.HTTPConnection("www.google.com")
>>> r = c.request("PATCH", "/index.html")
>>> print(r.status, r.reason)
405 Method Not Allowed

I'm assuming that the HTTP 405 is coming from the server and that it is "not allowed".

By the way, thanks for showing me the cool PATCH method in HTTP.

Weanling

Thanks for the answer, I will try that later and mark as accepted. GitHub API accepted POST instead of PATCH, but I will give that a try and keep this for future. – Accustom

Answer 4

It is incredibly simple with httplib2:

import httplib2

http = httplib2.Http()
http.request("http://www.google.com", "PATCH", <patch content>)

It supports Python 2.3 or later (including 3.x) and works beautifully!

Dudgeon