As far as requests is concerned, there is no difference between a zip file and any other binary blob of data.

Your server is broken here; it is cutting of the connection when you send it a zip file. That is not something requests can do anything about.

You may want to test against http://httpbin.org/ when you run into problems like these; it is a testing service built by the author of the requests library.

Another tip: you don't need to read the whole file object into memory when sending. Just pass the object itself to requests instead:

fileobj = open('/Users/.../test.zip', 'rb')
r = requests.post(url, auth=HTTPDigestAuth('dev', 'dev'), data = {"mysubmit":"Go"}, files={"archive": ("test.zip", fileobj)})

Demo against httpbin.org:

>>> import requests
>>> fileobj = open('/tmp/test.zip', 'rb')
>>> r = requests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', data={"mysubmit":"Go"}, files={"archive": ("test.zip", fileobj)})
>>> r
<Response [200]>
>>> r.json()
{u'origin': u'217.32.203.188', u'files': {u'archive': u'data:application/zip;base64,<long base64 body omitted>'}, u'form': {u'mysubmit': u'Go'}, u'url': u'http://httpbin.org/post', u'args': {}, u'headers': {u'Content-Length': u'57008', u'Accept-Encoding': u'gzip, deflate, compress', u'Connection': u'close', u'Accept': u'*/*', u'User-Agent': u'python-requests/1.2.3 CPython/2.7.5 Darwin/12.4.0', u'Host': u'httpbin.org', u'Content-Type': u'multipart/form-data; boundary=9aec1d03a1794177a38b48416dd4c811'}, u'json': None, u'data': u''}

may be this will help you.

 with open(zipname, 'rb') as f:
uploadbase = requests.put('url',
                    auth=(base, pwd),
                    data=f,
                    headers={'X-File-Name' : zipname, 
                                  'Content-Disposition': 'form-data; name="{0}"; filename="{0}"'.format(zipname), 
                                   'content-type': 'multipart/form-data'})

the difference between put and post

As far as I can tell, the proper way to do this in Python 2 is:

import requests, zipfile, StringIO
r = requests.get(zip_file_url, stream=True)
z = zipfile.ZipFile(StringIO.StringIO(r.content))
z.extractall()

of course you'd want to check that the GET was successful with r.ok.

For python 3+, sub the StringIO module with the io module and use BytesIO instead of StringIO: Here are release notes that mention this change.

import requests, zipfile, io
r = requests.get(zip_file_url)
z = zipfile.ZipFile(io.BytesIO(r.content))
z.extractall("/path/to/destination_directory")