import urllib2 gh_url = 'https://api.github.com' reg = urllib2.Request(gh_url) password_manager = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm() password_manager.add_password(None,gh_url,'user','pass') auth_manager = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_manager) opener = urllib2.build_opener(auth_manager) urllib2.install_opener(opener) handler = urllib2.urlopen(reg) print handler.getcode() print handler.headers.getheader('content-type')