how to use github api token in python for requesting

For one, I would recommend using a wrapper for the API. You're asking a lot of questions on here that could be simplified by finding a wrapper whose API you appreciate. There's a list of wrappers written in Python here.

As for your actually answering your question, the GitHub documentation is fairly clear that you need to send the Authorization header. Your call would actually look like this:

self.headers = {'Authorization': 'token %s' % self.api_token}
r = requests.post(url, headers=self.headers)

Since it seems like you're using requests and a class, might I be so bold as to make a recommendation? Let's say you're doing something like making a client for the API. You might have a class like so:

class GitHub(object):
    def __init__(self, **config_options):
        self.__dict__.update(**config_options)
        self.session = requests.Session()
        if hasattr(self, 'api_token'):
           self.session.headers['Authorization'] = 'token %s' % self.api_token
        elif hasattr(self, 'username') and hasattr(self, 'password'):
           self.session.auth = (self.username, self.password)

    def call_to_the_api(self, *args):
        # do stuff with args
        return self.session.post(url)

The Session object will take care of the authentication for you (either by the tokens or username and password combination).

Also, if you end up deciding to use github3.py for your API wrapper needs, there's a tag on here for it.

I followed the API documentation and tried to set the Authorization header in my call to requests.get(). However, this always returned a 401 error. So I checked the headers from Response object's request attribute and found that the Authorization header from my request had been rewritten. After a little digging in the source code, I found that when the request calls for HTTP Basic Auth, the Authorization header gets rewritten (see here).

So, the solution was to pass the token in an auth tuple when calling requests.get(). For example:

requests.get('https://api.github.com/notifications', auth=(my_username, my_token))

Unfortunately, this answer (currently the highest-voted one) won't work, as the method from that answer is precisely what I was using before trying the solution above.

Here's some code that might help you out.

Examples:

Example 1 (auth):

username = 'user'
token = 'token'

login = requests.get('https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=github+api', auth=(username,token))

Example 2 (headers):

headers = {'Authorization': 'token ' + token}

login = requests.get('https://api.github.com/user', headers=headers)
print(login.json())

Example 3 (delete repo):

user = 'username'
repo = 'some_repo' # Delete this repo

headers = {'Authorization': 'token ' + token}

login = requests.delete('https://api.github.com/' + 'repos/' + user + '/' + repo, headers=headers)

Example 4 (create repo):

repo = 'some_repo'
description = 'Created with api'

payload = {'name': repo, 'description': description, 'auto_init': 'true'}

login = requests.post('https://api.github.com/' + 'user/repos', auth=(user,token), data=json.dumps(payload))

You might want to take a look at the following docs:

Requests Docs

Github API docs

I hope this helps.