User guide

Installing pythapi

pythapi is made available through pypi. It can be installed using pip:

$ pip install pythapi

If your system uses both Python 2 or Python 3, you can also install pythapi for python 3:

$ pip3 install pythapi

If you're not using pip or pip isn't available on you system. You can also download pythapi from pypi or directly from Github, extract and then install it:

$ python setup.py install

Basic methods

pythapi has the 4 default HTTP(s) methods:

• GET
• POST
• PUT
• DELETE

All 4 methods can be called after you've created an endpoint connection.

Creating the API connection

Before you can execute any API calls, pythapi has to know the endpoint and the base URL:

apiEndpoint = pythapi.Connect('localhost', '/base/api/url')

GET

GET is a basic API call with an URL and a query part. If you don't need authentication with your API call, you have to set authentication to False:

apiEndpoint.get("/users", , authentication=False)

If you have parameters to pass:

apiEndpoint.get("/users?name=john&age=34", authentication=False)

POST

Passing a body using POST can be done by passing a data parameter:

data={
    "password": "password",
    "username": "username"
}

# This post call will get a token. The authorication has been disabled for this because an username and password is send without an authorization in the header
result = apiEndpoint.post('/login', data, authentication=False)

PUT

The same example as above can be used for PUT:

data={
    "oldpassword": "password",
    "username": "username",
    "newpassword": "iamanewpassword"
}

# This time I'm not passing the 'authentication' parameter because it's 'True' by default.
result = apiEndpoint.put('/changepassword', data)

DELETE

The DELETE method looks the same as the GETmethod:

# Delete user with ID 12
result = apiEndpoint.delete('/users/12')

Security

pythapi currenlty only supports API calls over HTTPS. By default, it requires an authorization parameter in the header. This parameter contains an access token and a token type in the format of:

<type> + ' ' + <token>

For example, the POST API call example performs a login with an username and a password. The authorization is set to False so pythapi sends a header without the authorizationparameter.

As soon you have the result from this POST call, you can configure the authorizationwith the results:

# Configure the authorization header info
apiEndpoint.authorization = result['tokenType'] + ' ' + result['accessToken']

This results in:

'Basic abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'

Now every other API call you perform will pass this result as its authorization parameter. Other authorization types can be:

• Bearer
• Digest
• HOBA
• Mutual
• AWS4-HMAC-SHA256