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How to work with the Notion API in Python

Guide on how to work with the Notion API in Python and automate database editing.


Learn how to work with the Notion API in Python. In this guide we go over:

  • How to set up the Notion API
  • How to set up the Python code
  • How to create database entries
  • How to query the database
  • How to update database entries
  • And how to delete entries.

Setting up the Notion API and a Database

First, let's create a full page database in our Notion board. In this tutorial I use a real example from one of my own databases that automatically stores my blog posts whenever I publish a new one. The database has the fields URL, Title, and Published, and demonstates how to edit text and date fields:

Notion database

Next, follow the official guide to Create a Notion Integration. Following all steps in this page you will:

  • Create an integration and get a Token
  • Share your database with your integration
  • Save the database ID

Now we are ready to automate things in this database with create, read, update, and delete functions.

Set up the Python code

To work with the API, we work with the requests module. We can install it with pip:

pip install requests

Define your token, database ID, and the headers like this. You can find the latest Notion version in the official docs.

import requests

NOTION_TOKEN = "YOUR_INTEGRATION_TOKEN"
DATABASE_ID = "YOUR_DATABASE_ID"

headers = {
    "Authorization": "Bearer " + NOTION_TOKEN,
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
    "Notion-Version": "2022-06-28",
}

Creating pages in your Notion database

To create a new page, we send a POST request:

def create_page(data: dict):
    create_url = "https://api.notion.com/v1/pages"

    payload = {"parent": {"database_id": DATABASE_ID}, "properties": data}

    res = requests.post(create_url, headers=headers, json=payload)
    # print(res.status_code)
    return res

The corresponding data fields have to correspond to your table column names.

The schema might look a bit complicated and differs for different data types (e.g. text, date, boolean etc.). To determine the exact schema, I recommend dumping the data (see next step) and inspecting the JSON file.

In our example, we create data for the URL, the Title, and the Published columns like so:

from datetime import datetime, timezone

title = "Test Title"
description = "Test Description"
published_date = datetime.now().astimezone(timezone.utc).isoformat()
data = {
    "URL": {"title": [{"text": {"content": description}}]},
    "Title": {"rich_text": [{"text": {"content": title}}]},
    "Published": {"date": {"start": published_date, "end": None}}
}

create_page(data)

Querying Notion database and reading pages

To query your database and read all entries, we can use the following function. It uses pagination to retrieve all entries:

def get_pages(num_pages=None):
    """
    If num_pages is None, get all pages, otherwise just the defined number.
    """
    url = f"https://api.notion.com/v1/databases/{DATABASE_ID}/query"

    get_all = num_pages is None
    page_size = 100 if get_all else num_pages

    payload = {"page_size": page_size}
    response = requests.post(url, json=payload, headers=headers)

    data = response.json()

    # Comment this out to dump all data to a file
    # import json
    # with open('db.json', 'w', encoding='utf8') as f:
    #    json.dump(data, f, ensure_ascii=False, indent=4)

    results = data["results"]
    while data["has_more"] and get_all:
        payload = {"page_size": page_size, "start_cursor": data["next_cursor"]}
        url = f"https://api.notion.com/v1/databases/{DATABASE_ID}/query"
        response = requests.post(url, json=payload, headers=headers)
        data = response.json()
        results.extend(data["results"])

    return results

Then we can retrieve all pages, iterate over them, and access the different fields:

pages = get_pages()

for page in pages:
    page_id = page["id"]
    props = page["properties"]
    url = props["URL"]["title"][0]["text"]["content"]
    title = props["Title"]["rich_text"][0]["text"]["content"]
    published = props["Published"]["date"]["start"]
    published = datetime.fromisoformat(published)

Updating pages in your Notion databse

To update a page, we have to send a PATCH request:

def update_page(page_id: str, data: dict):
    url = f"https://api.notion.com/v1/pages/{page_id}"

    payload = {"properties": data}

    res = requests.patch(url, json=payload, headers=headers)
    return res

For example, if we want to update the Published field, we send the following data. It is the same schema as for creating the page:

page_id = "the page id"

new_date = datetime(2023, 1, 15).astimezone(timezone.utc).isoformat()
update_data = {"Published": {"date": {"start": new_date, "end": None}}}

update_page(page_id, update_data)

Deleting pages in your Notion database

Deleting a page is achieved with the same endpoint as for updating the page, but here we set the archived parameter to True:

def delete_page(page_id: str):
    url = f"https://api.notion.com/v1/pages/{page_id}"

    payload = {"archived": True}

    res = requests.patch(url, json=payload, headers=headers)
    return res

Further references

And that's it. To learn more, you can check out the following official Notion links:


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