Unable to POST to Grafana using Python3 module requests - python-requests

Question

I'm trying to create a dashboard on Grafana using their backend API. I first test that my API token is set up by using GET and successfully get a return code of 200(shown below). I then try to use POST to create a simple dashboard but I keep getting a return code of 400. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the payload I'm trying to send, but I have been unable to figure it out. Here is the link to the example page I'm using for their JSON format. http://docs.grafana.org/reference/http_api/
import requests
headers = {"Accept": "application/json","Content-Type": "application/json" ,"Authorization": "Bearer xxx"}
r = requests.get("http://www.localhost",headers=headers)
print(r.text)
print(r.status_code)
dashboard = {"id": None,
"title": "API_dashboard_test",
"tags": "[CL-5]",
"timezone": "browser",
"rows":"[{}]",
"schemaVersion": 6,
"version": 0
}
payload = {"dashboard": "%s" % dashboard}
url = "http://www.localhost/api/dashboards/db"
p = requests.post(url,headers=headers, data=payload)
print(p)
print(p.status_code)
print(p.text)
OUTPUT:
200
<Response [400]>
400
[{"classification":"DeserializationError","message":"invalid character 'd' looking for beginning of value"},{"fieldNames":["Dashboard"],"classification":"RequiredError","message":"Required"}]

Answer 1

The problem is that your object is not an actual json object.
You can use post method with json=YOUR_PYTHON_OBJECT
So to fix your code, change your dictionary to use just a regular python dictionary, use json=payload, rather than data=payload.
So refactoring your code, you will have:
import requests
headers = {"Accept": "application/json",
"Content-Type": "application/json",
"Authorization": "Bearer xxx"
}
r = requests.get("http://www.localhost", headers=headers)
print(r.text)
print(r.status_code)
dashboard = {"id": None,
"title": "API_dashboard_test",
"tags": ["CL-5"],
"timezone": "browser",
"rows": [{}],
"schemaVersion": 6,
"version": 0
}
payload = {"dashboard": dashboard}
url = "http://www.localhost/api/dashboards/db"
p = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload)
print(p)
print(p.status_code)
print(p.text)
Note the differences in dashboard, for example, "rows" was changed from "[{}]" to just [{}] so that it is a python object (list with empty dictionary), rather than a string.
The output is
200
<Response [200]>
200
{"slug":"api_dashboard_test","status":"success","version":0}