[python] How to send a "multipart/form-data" with requests in python?

You need to use the files parameter to send a multipart form POST request even when you do not need to upload any files.

From the original requests source:

def request(method, url, **kwargs):
    """Constructs and sends a :class:`Request <Request>`.

    ...
    :param files: (optional) Dictionary of ``'name': file-like-objects``
        (or ``{'name': file-tuple}``) for multipart encoding upload.
        ``file-tuple`` can be a 2-tuple ``('filename', fileobj)``,
        3-tuple ``('filename', fileobj, 'content_type')``
        or a 4-tuple ``('filename', fileobj, 'content_type', custom_headers)``,
        where ``'content-type'`` is a string
        defining the content type of the given file
        and ``custom_headers`` a dict-like object 
        containing additional headers to add for the file.

The relevant part is: file-tuple can be a2-tuple, 3-tupleor a4-tuple.

Based on the above, the simplest multipart form request that includes both files to upload and form fields will look like this:

multipart_form_data = {
    'file2': ('custom_file_name.zip', open('myfile.zip', 'rb')),
    'action': (None, 'store'),
    'path': (None, '/path1')
}

response = requests.post('https://httpbin.org/post', files=multipart_form_data)

print(response.content)

☝ Note the None as the first argument in the tuple for plain text fields — this is a placeholder for the filename field which is only used for file uploads, but for text fields passing None as the first parameter is required in order for the data to be submitted.

Multiple fields with the same name

If you need to post multiple fields with the same name then instead of a dictionary you can define your payload as a list (or a tuple) of tuples:

multipart_form_data = (
    ('file2', ('custom_file_name.zip', open('myfile.zip', 'rb'))),
    ('action', (None, 'store')),
    ('path', (None, '/path1')),
    ('path', (None, '/path2')),
    ('path', (None, '/path3')),
)

Streaming requests API

If the above API is not pythonic enough for you, then consider using requests toolbelt (pip install requests_toolbelt) which is an extension of the core requests module that provides support for file upload streaming as well as the MultipartEncoder which can be used instead of files, and which also lets you define the payload as a dictionary, tuple or list.

MultipartEncoder can be used both for multipart requests with or without actual upload fields. It must be assigned to the data parameter.

import requests
from requests_toolbelt.multipart.encoder import MultipartEncoder

multipart_data = MultipartEncoder(
    fields={
            # a file upload field
            'file': ('file.zip', open('file.zip', 'rb'), 'text/plain')
            # plain text fields
            'field0': 'value0', 
            'field1': 'value1',
           }
    )

response = requests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', data=multipart_data,
                  headers={'Content-Type': multipart_data.content_type})

If you need to send multiple fields with the same name, or if the order of form fields is important, then a tuple or a list can be used instead of a dictionary:

multipart_data = MultipartEncoder(
    fields=(
            ('action', 'ingest'), 
            ('item', 'spam'),
            ('item', 'sausage'),
            ('item', 'eggs'),
           )
    )