>>> import pycurl
>>> print pycurl.__doc__

PycURL is a Python interface to libcurl. PycURL can be used to fetch objects identified by a URL from a Python program, similar to the urllib Python module. PycURL is mature, very fast, and supports a lot of features.

Overview

• libcurl is a free and easy-to-use client-side URL transfer library, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS, FILE, IMAP, SMTP, POP3 and RTSP. libcurl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, Kerberos4), file transfer resume, http proxy tunneling and more!
  
  
• libcurl is highly portable, it builds and works identically on numerous platforms, including Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, HPUX, IRIX, AIX, Tru64, Linux, UnixWare, HURD, Windows, Amiga, OS/2, BeOs, Mac OS X, Ultrix, QNX, OpenVMS, RISC OS, Novell NetWare, DOS and more...
  
  
• libcurl is free, thread-safe, IPv6 compatible, feature rich, well supported, fast, thoroughly documented and is already used by many known, big and successful companies and numerous applications.

Intended Audience

PycURL is targeted at the advanced developer - if you need dozens of concurrent fast and reliable connections or any of the sophisticated features as listed above then PycURL is for you.

The main drawback with PycURL is that it is a relative thin layer over libcurl without any of those nice Pythonic class hierarchies. This means it has a somewhat steep learning curve unless you are already familiar with libcurl's C API.

To sum up, PycURL is very fast (esp. for multiple concurrent operations) and very feature complete, but has a somewhat complex interface. If you need something simpler or prefer a pure Python module you might want to check out urllib2 and urlgrabber.

Documentation

PycURL now includes API documentation in the doc directory of the distribution, as well as a number of test and example scripts in the tests and examples directories of the distribution.

The real info, though, is located in the libcurl documentation, most important being curl_easy_setopt. The libcurl tutorial also provides a lot of useful information.

For a quick start have a look at the high-performance URL downloader retriever-multi.py.

For a list of changes consult the PycURL ChangeLog.

Download

Download PycURL sources version 7.19.0 (Sep 9 2008) or try the code from the CVS repository.

You can get prebuilt Win32 modules as well as older versions from the download area. Please note that the prebuilt versions are provided for your convenience only and are completely unsupported - use them at your own risk.

Community

If you want to ask questions or discuss PycURL related issues, our mailing list is the place to be.

The PycURL SourceForge project page provides bug- and patch tracking systems.

And the libcurl library also has it's own mailing lists.

License