import requests, base64

​

usrPass = "userid:password"

b64Val = base64.b64encode(usrPass)

r=requests.post(api_URL, 

                headers={"Authorization": "Basic %s" % b64Val},

                data=payload)

The requests library has Basic Auth support and will encode it for you automatically. You can test it out by running the following in a python repl

​

from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth

r = requests.post(api_URL, auth=HTTPBasicAuth('user', 'pass'), data=payload)

You can confirm this encoding by typing the following.

​

r.request.headers['Authorization']

outputs:

​

u'Basic c2RhZG1pbmlzdHJhdG9yOiFTRG0wMDY4'