You'd be surprised what they could eat.
Yes, you should feed carpet pythons rats from birth to death (though big ones can take guinea pigs, rabbits etc).
I order my frozen rat pinkies online. There are a number of places you can do this from.
Rodentpro.com is a big name.
I ordered from a guy off of kingsnake.com who had slightly better prices, but I think next time I'll go with rodent pro as I've had issues with quality in packaging.