curl works fine, except if I call it with subprocess

The only point of having a shell, in this scenario, is to split your string into a set of arguments.

Thing is, you don't need anything to do that for you -- you can do it more accurately and consistently yourself!

subprocess.call([  'curl',  '-1',  '-X', 'POST',   '--user', 'xxx:yyy',  '-d', 'status=new&content=issue+details+at%3A+http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%3A6543%2Ftest%2Fsubmit%2F16-07-03-H-20-18-&kind=bug&title=QA+Fail&responsible=xxx&priority=critical',  'https://api.bitbucket.org/1.0/repositories/my/repo/issues'])

This also avoids confusion between literal and syntactic quotes: When specifying a literal argv, the literal Python string you pass is the literal string the child process receives -- there's no need for quoted quotes to be passed to the shell.

This is much more reliable than starting with a string and splitting it, even with Python builtins: Consider a case where your username contains whitespace. A list containing

'--user', 'user name:password'

...is completely unambiguous, whereas

--user user name:password

...will parse incorrectly.

Even worse would be a username containing $(rm -rf $HOME) -- if you use os.system() or subprocess.Popen(..., shell=True), that username could be executed as a command; with a literal string, you're entirely safe.

That said -- the specific error, re: libcurl not being compiled with SSL support, isn't going to be calling-convention-specific. I'd suggest inspecting your environment -- if you have different versions of curl first in the PATH, or different versions of libcurl in LD_LIBRARY_PATH between your environments, that would explain the error in question.

I can't answer your question about using the curl command in subprocess, but it might work if you just call os.system Like this:

import osos.system ("curl -1 -X POST --user \"xxx:yyy\" -d \"status=new&content=issue+details+at%3A+http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%3A6543%2Ftest%2Fsubmit%2F16-07-03-H-20-18-&kind=bug&title=QA+Fail&responsible=xxx&priority=critical\"  \"https://api.bitbucket.org/1.0/repositories/my/repo/issues\"")

This most likely works knowing that curl runs via the terminal directly.

This might help with your question about curl not running in subprocess (probably has something to do with the environment of subprocess being different then the environment that curl was configured): https://curl.haxx.se/docs/faq.html#curl_1_SSL_is_disabled_https

If this is useful please upvote Andrae's answer, it set me on the right path.

looking at the error message:

curl: (1) Protocol "https not supported or disabled in libcurl

see "https is the problem, https on the other hand works fine.

The issue was that I thought I was supposed to enclose my argument strings in quotes.

So there are two easy ways to get around this:

lCmd = shlex.split(sCmd)subprocess.call(lCmd) 

or

import osos.system(sCmd)