How to Convert a cURL Command to Python (requests)

This table covers virtually every cURL command you'll meet. Learn it once and the conversion becomes automatic:

Here's a typical authenticated API call in cURL:

curl -X POST https://postman-echo.com/post \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer tok_123" \
  -d '{"name":"mithun","plan":"pro"}'

And the direct requests translation — -X POST → requests.post, the two -H flags → headers={}, the JSON -d → json={}:

import requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://postman-echo.com/post",
    headers={
        "Content-Type": "application/json",
        "Authorization": "Bearer tok_123",
    },
    json={"name": "mithun", "plan": "pro"},
)
print(r.status_code, r.json()["json"])

I ran both against the live echo server. They returned the same thing — the server saw an identical body and auth header either way:

# curl     -> body: {'name': 'mithun', 'plan': 'pro'} | auth: Bearer tok_123
# requests -> 200  {'name': 'mithun', 'plan': 'pro'} | auth: Bearer tok_123

Query strings are where hand-conversion trips people up. Don't paste ?q=python&page=2 into the URL — pass a params dict and let requests build the query string (and URL-encode it) for you:

# curl "https://postman-echo.com/get?q=python&page=2" -A "my-app/1.0"

import requests
r = requests.get(
    "https://postman-echo.com/get",
    params={"q": "python", "page": "2"},
    headers={"User-Agent": "my-app/1.0"},
)
print(r.json()["args"])   # -> {'q': 'python', 'page': '2'}

Tested: the server echoed {'q': 'python', 'page': '2'} and the custom User-Agent came through — exactly as the cURL version. Using params also means special characters get encoded correctly, which is easy to get wrong by hand.

When you just want the Python and don't want to think about flags, paste the whole command into the free cURL to Python converter. It parses the command — method, headers, body, auth, params — and returns ready-to-run requests code. It runs in your browser.

• JSON vs form: -d '{...}' is *usually* JSON → use json=. But -d "a=b&c=d" is form data → use data=. cURL doesn't distinguish; you have to.
• `requests` follows redirects by default — cURL does not unless you pass -L. If you're matching cURL exactly, add allow_redirects=False.
• Cookies and sessions: for multiple calls that share cookies/auth, use a requests.Session() instead of repeating headers on every call.
• File uploads: -F "file=@photo.png" becomes files={"file": open("photo.png", "rb")} — and don't also set Content-Type by hand; requests sets the multipart boundary for you.
• `--insecure`/`-k` maps to verify=False, but only use it for local testing — it disables TLS verification.

Not every search for curl in Python wants to convert a specific command — a lot of people just want to make the *same kind of HTTP request* from Python. Python has no built-in curl, so you have three real options, in the order you should reach for them:

1. `requests` — the idiomatic way (recommended). Everything on this page maps a cURL command onto requests. It's pure Python, needs no curl binary, and gives you .json(), sessions, and clean error handling.
2. `subprocess` — actually run the real `curl` binary from Python. Use this when you need cURL's exact behavior, or a flag requests doesn't expose. It shells out to the same curl you'd type in a terminal.
3. `pycurl` — a binding to libcurl (the C library that powers cURL itself). Maximum control and performance, but heavier to install and far more verbose — only worth it for special cases.

The subprocess route runs the exact command you'd type by hand. I ran this against a live echo server:

import subprocess, json

out = subprocess.run(
    ["curl", "-s", "-X", "POST", "https://postman-echo.com/post",
     "-H", "Content-Type: application/json",
     "-d", json.dumps({"name": "mithun", "plan": "pro"})],
    capture_output=True, text=True,
)
print(out.returncode, json.loads(out.stdout)["json"])
# -> 0 {'name': 'mithun', 'plan': 'pro'}

Sometimes you need to go the *other* direction — you have working requests code and want the equivalent curl command to share a repro, paste into a bug report, or test in a terminal. The curlify library does it from a prepared request:

import requests, curlify

req = requests.Request(
    "POST", "https://postman-echo.com/post",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer tok_123"},
    json={"name": "mithun", "plan": "pro"},
)
prepared = requests.Session().prepare_request(req)
print(curlify.to_curl(prepared))

curl -H 'Authorization: Bearer tok_123' \
     -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     -d '{"name": "mithun", "plan": "pro"}' \
     https://postman-echo.com/post

One honest caveat from my run: curlify also emits the headers requests adds automatically — User-Agent: python-requests/…, Accept, Accept-Encoding, Connection — so the real output is noisier than above. Drop the ones you don't care about and you've got a clean, runnable cURL command.