Unirest is a set of lightweight HTTP libraries in multiple languages.

To utilize unirest, install the unirest pip:

pip install unirest

After installing the pip package you can now begin to simplifying requests by import:

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("http://httpbin.org/post", { "Accept": "application/json" }, { "parameter": 23, "foo": "bar" })

Python also has support for asynchronous requests in which you can define a callback to be passed along and invoked when Unirest recieves the response. For non-blocking requests in Python we need to define ourselves a callback to reference inside of our request method upon response:

def callback(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("http://httpbin.org/post", { "Accept": "application/json" }, { "parameter": 23, "foo": "bar" }, callback)

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

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

import json

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

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

• url - Endpoint, address, or uri to be acted upon and requested information from.
• headers - Request Headers as associative array or object
• body - Request Body associative array or object
• callback - Asychronous callback method to be invoked upon result.

Upon recieving 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