BeanBag

BeanBag is a simple module that lets you access REST APIs in an easy way. The idea is calling a REST API shouldn't be any harder than calling an XML-RPC API, and ideally no harder than calling a local API.

It uses the wonderful requests module, which is the only sensible way to talk to the web from python.

It's heavily inspired by Kadir Pekel's Hammock, though sadly only shares a license, and not any actual code. Hammock is available from https://github.com/kadirpekel/hammock.

Proof

Here's how you access github with BeanBag:

>>> import beanbag

>>> github = beanbag.BeanBag("https://api.github.com")

>>> watchers = github.repos.ajtowns.beanbag.watchers()
>>> for w in watchers: print w["login"]

Pretty easy! (Easier than Hammock even :)

The above was a basic GET request, but you can do PUT requests easily too, though you'll usually need to provide some sort of authentication details:

>>> import requests

>>> sess = requests.Session()
>>> sess.auth = (user, pass)   # github email address, password
>>> github = beanbag.BeanBag("https://api.github.com", session=sess)

>>> github.user.watched.ajtowns.beanbag = None

>>> "https://api.github.com/repos/ajtowns/beanbag" in (
...     i["url"] for i in github.user.watched() )
True

You can do DELETE requests too:

>>> del github.user.watched.ajtowns.beanbag

>>> "https://api.github.com/repos/ajtowns/beanbag" in (
...     i["url"] for i in github.user.watched() )
False

You can use array-style references in place of attributes if you're dealing with variable components (or paths that are python reserved words, or otherwise invalid as an attribute):

>>> owner, repo = "ajtowns", "beanbag"
>>> watchers = github.repos[owner][repo].watchers()
>>> for w in watchers: print w["login"]

POST and PATCH also have syntactic sugar, and

>>> # create a fork (POST request with empty body)
>>> repo = github.repos.ajtowns.beanbag.forks( None )
>>> u,r = repo["owner"]["login"], repo["name"]
>>> print u,r
$YOU beanbag

>>> print github.repos[u][r]()["description"]
Helper module for accessing REST interfaces from Python

>>> d = "My fork is way betterer!!"
>>> github.repos[u][r] += {"name": r, "description": d}

>>> print github.repos[u][r]()["description"]
My fork is way betterer!!

By default, BeanBag only adds a trailing slash to the base URL. If you want a trailing slash elsewhere, you can add "._", like so:

>>> str(github)
'https://api.github.com/'
>>> str(github.repos)
'https://api.github.com/repos'
>>> str(github.repos._)
'https://api.github.com/repos/'
>>> str(github.repos["_"])
'https://api.github.com/repos/_'

Also, you can use "str()" to find out the URL a resource actually maps to!