---
id: bravado-core
version: "6.4.1"
license: BSD 3-Clause
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# bravado-core — Library for adding Swagger support to clients and servers

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 431.0K/mo

## What it is and what it does

bravado-core is a Python library that implements client-side and server-side support for OpenAPI Specification v2.0 (formerly Swagger). It provides schema validation, request/response marshaling and transformation, and custom type conversion through a pluggable format system. The library represents API models as either Python classes or dictionaries, making it suitable for both strongly-typed and flexible use cases.

The package depends on jsonschema for schema validation, requests for HTTP operations, pyyaml for configuration parsing, and several utility libraries for date handling and serialization. It is actively maintained, supports Python 3.8 through 3.11, and has no known security vulnerabilities. The library is intended for developers building OpenAPI-compliant clients or servers who need robust schema validation and data transformation.

Use it for:

- Validate incoming API requests and responses against an OpenAPI v2.0 schema in a server application.
- Marshal Python objects to and from JSON/YAML request and response bodies with automatic type conversion.
- Build a Python client that enforces OpenAPI schema constraints during request construction.
- Define custom format handlers to convert between OpenAPI types and Python domain objects.
- Integrate OpenAPI schema validation into a REST framework or API gateway.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

bravado-core validates, marshals, and transforms OpenAPI Specification v2.0 schemas for Python clients and servers, handling request/response validation and type conversion.

Yes. bravado-core is actively maintained, has no known vulnerabilities, supports current Python versions (3.8–3.11), and carries a permissive BSD 3-Clause license. Low install friction and a stable API make it a solid choice for projects that need OpenAPI v2.0 schema validation and marshaling. Install it if you are building or consuming OpenAPI v2.0 APIs in Python.

## Install

pip install bravado-core
uv add bravado-core
poetry add bravado-core

## Installing bravado-core

Before you install: Low install friction with a pure-Python wheel distribution. Active maintenance with a recent release (94 days ago) and an actively maintained repository.

License in practice: BSD 3-Clause is permissive; you can use, modify, and distribute bravado-core with minimal restrictions, provided you include the license notice.

Quickstart:

pip install bravado-core

from bravado_core.spec import Spec
from bravado_core.spec_dict import build_spec_dict

spec_dict = build_spec_dict()
spec = Spec.from_dict(spec_dict)

Requires Python 3.8 or later.

Verify before relying:

- Whether the package supports OpenAPI v3.x in addition to v2.0, or only v2.0 as stated in the description.
- Performance characteristics when validating large or deeply nested schemas.

## Package facts

- License: BSD 3-Clause (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 431.0K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

openapi v2 schema validation, swagger spec validation python, openapi marshaling and transformation, request response validation openapi, swagger client server support, openapi, schema-validation, api-tooling

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