How do I add basic authentication to a Python REST request?

Question

I have the following simple Python code that makes a simple post request to a REST service -

params= { "param1" : param1,
          "param2" : param2,
          "param3" : param3 }
xmlResults = urllib.urlopen(MY_APP_PATH, urllib.urlencode(params)).read()
results = MyResponseParser.parse(xmlResults)

The problem is that the url used to call the REST service will now require basic authentication (username and password). How can I incorporate a username and password / basic authentication into this code, as simply as possible?

Solution 1

If basic authentication = HTTP authentication, use this:

import urllib
import urllib2

username = 'foo'
password = 'bar'

passman = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
passman.add_password(None, MY_APP_PATH, username, password)
authhandler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(passman)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(authhandler)
urllib2.install_opener(opener)

params= { "param1" : param1,
          "param2" : param2,
          "param3" : param3 }

xmlResults = urllib2.urlopen(MY_APP_PATH, urllib.urlencode(params)).read()
results = MyResponseParser.parse(xmlResults)

If not, use mechanize or cookielib to make an additional request for logging in. But if the service you access has an XML API, this API surely includes auth too.

2016 edit: By all means, use the requests library! It provides all of the above in a single call.

Solution 2

You may want a library to abstract out some of the details. I've used restkit to great effect before. It handles HTTP auth.