Requests: HTTP for Humans

Release v2.0.0. (Installation)

Requests is an Apache2 Licensed HTTP library, written in Python, for human beings.

Python’s standard urllib2 module provides most of the HTTP capabilities you need, but the API is thoroughly broken. It was built for a different time — and a different web. It requires an enormous amount of work (even method overrides) to perform the simplest of tasks.

Things shouldn’t be this way. Not in Python.

>>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/user', auth=('user', 'pass'))
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.headers['content-type']
'application/json; charset=utf8'
>>> r.encoding
'utf-8'
>>> r.text
u'{"type":"User"...'
>>> r.json()
{u'private_gists': 419, u'total_private_repos': 77, ...}

See similar code, without Requests.

Requests takes all of the work out of Python HTTP/1.1 — making your integration with web services seamless. There’s no need to manually add query strings to your URLs, or to form-encode your POST data. Keep-alive and HTTP connection pooling are 100% automatic, powered by urllib3, which is embedded within Requests.

Testimonials

Her Majesty’s Government, Amazon, Google, Twilio, Runscope, Mozilla, Heroku, PayPal, NPR, Obama for America, Transifex, Native Instruments, The Washington Post, Twitter, SoundCloud, Kippt, Readability, and Federal US Institutions use Requests internally. It has been downloaded over 5,000,000 times from PyPI.

Armin Ronacher
Requests is the perfect example how beautiful an API can be with the right level of abstraction.
Matt DeBoard
I’m going to get @kennethreitz’s Python requests module tattooed on my body, somehow. The whole thing.
Daniel Greenfeld
Nuked a 1200 LOC spaghetti code library with 10 lines of code thanks to @kennethreitz’s request library. Today has been AWESOME.
Kenny Meyers
Python HTTP: When in doubt, or when not in doubt, use Requests. Beautiful, simple, Pythonic.

Feature Support

Requests is ready for today’s web.

  • International Domains and URLs
  • Keep-Alive & Connection Pooling
  • Sessions with Cookie Persistence
  • Browser-style SSL Verification
  • Basic/Digest Authentication
  • Elegant Key/Value Cookies
  • Automatic Decompression
  • Unicode Response Bodies
  • Multipart File Uploads
  • Connection Timeouts
  • .netrc support
  • Python 2.6—3.3
  • Thread-safe.

User Guide

This part of the documentation, which is mostly prose, begins with some background information about Requests, then focuses on step-by-step instructions for getting the most out of Requests.

Introduction

Philosophy

Requests was developed with a few PEP 20 idioms in mind.

  1. Beautiful is better than ugly.
  2. Explicit is better than implicit.
  3. Simple is better than complex.
  4. Complex is better than complicated.
  5. Readability counts.

All contributions to Requests should keep these important rules in mind.

Apache2 License

A large number of open source projects you find today are GPL Licensed. While the GPL has its time and place, it should most certainly not be your go-to license for your next open source project.

A project that is released as GPL cannot be used in any commercial product without the product itself also being offered as open source.

The MIT, BSD, ISC, and Apache2 licenses are great alternatives to the GPL that allow your open-source software to be used freely in proprietary, closed-source software.

Requests is released under terms of Apache2 License.

Requests License

Copyright 2013 Kenneth Reitz

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Installation

This part of the documentation covers the installation of Requests. The first step to using any software package is getting it properly installed.

Distribute & Pip

Installing Requests is simple with pip:

$ pip install requests

or, with easy_install:

$ easy_install requests

But, you really shouldn’t do that.

Cheeseshop (PyPI) Mirror

If the Cheeseshop (a.k.a. PyPI) is down, you can also install Requests from one of the mirrors. Crate.io is one of them:

$ pip install -i http://simple.crate.io/ requests

Get the Code

Requests is actively developed on GitHub, where the code is always available.

You can either clone the public repository:

git clone git://github.com/kennethreitz/requests.git

Download the tarball:

$ curl -OL https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/tarball/master

Or, download the zipball:

$ curl -OL https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/zipball/master

Once you have a copy of the source, you can embed it in your Python package, or install it into your site-packages easily:

$ python setup.py install

Quickstart

Eager to get started? This page gives a good introduction in how to get started with Requests. This assumes you already have Requests installed. If you do not, head over to the Installation section.

First, make sure that:

Let’s get started with some simple examples.

Make a Request

Making a request with Requests is very simple.

Begin by importing the Requests module:

>>> import requests

Now, let’s try to get a webpage. For this example, let’s get GitHub’s public timeline

>>> r = requests.get('https://github.com/timeline.json')

Now, we have a Response object called r. We can get all the information we need from this object.

Requests’ simple API means that all forms of HTTP request are as obvious. For example, this is how you make an HTTP POST request:

>>> r = requests.post("http://httpbin.org/post")

Nice, right? What about the other HTTP request types: PUT, DELETE, HEAD and OPTIONS? These are all just as simple:

>>> r = requests.put("http://httpbin.org/put")
>>> r = requests.delete("http://httpbin.org/delete")
>>> r = requests.head("http://httpbin.org/get")
>>> r = requests.options("http://httpbin.org/get")

That’s all well and good, but it’s also only the start of what Requests can do.

Passing Parameters In URLs

You often want to send some sort of data in the URL’s query string. If you were constructing the URL by hand, this data would be given as key/value pairs in the URL after a question mark, e.g. httpbin.org/get?key=val. Requests allows you to provide these arguments as a dictionary, using the params keyword argument. As an example, if you wanted to pass key1=value1 and key2=value2 to httpbin.org/get, you would use the following code:

>>> payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}
>>> r = requests.get("http://httpbin.org/get", params=payload)

You can see that the URL has been correctly encoded by printing the URL:

>>> print r.url
http://httpbin.org/get?key2=value2&key1=value1

Note that any dictionary key whose value is None will not be added to the URL’s query string.

Response Content

We can read the content of the server’s response. Consider the GitHub timeline again:

>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get('https://github.com/timeline.json')
>>> r.text
u'[{"repository":{"open_issues":0,"url":"https://github.com/...

Requests will automatically decode content from the server. Most unicode charsets are seamlessly decoded.

When you make a request, Requests makes educated guesses about the encoding of the response based on the HTTP headers. The text encoding guessed by Requests is used when you access r.text. You can find out what encoding Requests is using, and change it, using the r.encoding property:

>>> r.encoding
'utf-8'
>>> r.encoding = 'ISO-8859-1'

If you change the encoding, Requests will use the new value of r.encoding whenever you call r.text.

Requests will also use custom encodings in the event that you need them. If you have created your own encoding and registered it with the codecs module, you can simply use the codec name as the value of r.encoding and Requests will handle the decoding for you.

Binary Response Content

You can also access the response body as bytes, for non-text requests:

>>> r.content
b'[{"repository":{"open_issues":0,"url":"https://github.com/...

The gzip and deflate transfer-encodings are automatically decoded for you.

For example, to create an image from binary data returned by a request, you can use the following code:

>>> from PIL import Image
>>> from StringIO import StringIO
>>> i = Image.open(StringIO(r.content))

JSON Response Content

There’s also a builtin JSON decoder, in case you’re dealing with JSON data:

>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get('https://github.com/timeline.json')
>>> r.json()
[{u'repository': {u'open_issues': 0, u'url': 'https://github.com/...

In case the JSON decoding fails, r.json raises an exception. For example, if the response gets a 401 (Unauthorized), attempting r.json raises ValueError: No JSON object could be decoded

Raw Response Content

In the rare case that you’d like to get the raw socket response from the server, you can access r.raw. If you want to do this, make sure you set stream=True in your initial request. Once you do, you can do this:

>>> r = requests.get('https://github.com/timeline.json', stream=True)
>>> r.raw
<requests.packages.urllib3.response.HTTPResponse object at 0x101194810>
>>> r.raw.read(10)
'\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03'

Custom Headers

If you’d like to add HTTP headers to a request, simply pass in a dict to the headers parameter.

For example, we didn’t specify our content-type in the previous example:

>>> import json
>>> url = 'https://api.github.com/some/endpoint'
>>> payload = {'some': 'data'}
>>> headers = {'content-type': 'application/json'}

>>> r = requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(payload), headers=headers)

More complicated POST requests

Typically, you want to send some form-encoded data — much like an HTML form. To do this, simply pass a dictionary to the data argument. Your dictionary of data will automatically be form-encoded when the request is made:

>>> payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}
>>> r = requests.post("http://httpbin.org/post", data=payload)
>>> print r.text
{
  ...
  "form": {
    "key2": "value2",
    "key1": "value1"
  },
  ...
}

There are many times that you want to send data that is not form-encoded. If you pass in a string instead of a dict, that data will be posted directly.

For example, the GitHub API v3 accepts JSON-Encoded POST/PATCH data:

>>> import json
>>> url = 'https://api.github.com/some/endpoint'
>>> payload = {'some': 'data'}

>>> r = requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(payload))

POST a Multipart-Encoded File

Requests makes it simple to upload Multipart-encoded files:

>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/post'
>>> files = {'file': open('report.xls', 'rb')}

>>> r = requests.post(url, files=files)
>>> r.text
{
  ...
  "files": {
    "file": "<censored...binary...data>"
  },
  ...
}

You can set the filename explicitly:

>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/post'
>>> files = {'file': ('report.xls', open('report.xls', 'rb'))}

>>> r = requests.post(url, files=files)
>>> r.text
{
  ...
  "files": {
    "file": "<censored...binary...data>"
  },
  ...
}

If you want, you can send strings to be received as files:

>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/post'
>>> files = {'file': ('report.csv', 'some,data,to,send\nanother,row,to,send\n')}

>>> r = requests.post(url, files=files)
>>> r.text
{
  ...
  "files": {
    "file": "some,data,to,send\\nanother,row,to,send\\n"
  },
  ...
}

Response Status Codes

We can check the response status code:

>>> r = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/get')
>>> r.status_code
200

Requests also comes with a built-in status code lookup object for easy reference:

>>> r.status_code == requests.codes.ok
True

If we made a bad request (a 4XX client error or 5XX server error response), we can raise it with Response.raise_for_status():

>>> bad_r = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/status/404')
>>> bad_r.status_code
404

>>> bad_r.raise_for_status()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "requests/models.py", line 832, in raise_for_status
    raise http_error
requests.exceptions.HTTPError: 404 Client Error

But, since our status_code for r was 200, when we call raise_for_status() we get:

>>> r.raise_for_status()
None

All is well.

Response Headers

We can view the server’s response headers using a Python dictionary:

>>> r.headers
{
    'content-encoding': 'gzip',
    'transfer-encoding': 'chunked',
    'connection': 'close',
    'server': 'nginx/1.0.4',
    'x-runtime': '148ms',
    'etag': '"e1ca502697e5c9317743dc078f67693f"',
    'content-type': 'application/json'
}

The dictionary is special, though: it’s made just for HTTP headers. According to RFC 2616, HTTP Headers are case-insensitive.

So, we can access the headers using any capitalization we want:

>>> r.headers['Content-Type']
'application/json'

>>> r.headers.get('content-type')
'application/json'

Cookies

If a response contains some Cookies, you can get quick access to them:

>>> url = 'http://example.com/some/cookie/setting/url'
>>> r = requests.get(url)

>>> r.cookies['example_cookie_name']
'example_cookie_value'

To send your own cookies to the server, you can use the cookies parameter:

>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/cookies'
>>> cookies = dict(cookies_are='working')

>>> r = requests.get(url, cookies=cookies)
>>> r.text
'{"cookies": {"cookies_are": "working"}}'

Redirection and History

Requests will automatically perform location redirection while using the GET and OPTIONS verbs.

GitHub redirects all HTTP requests to HTTPS. We can use the history method of the Response object to track redirection. Let’s see what GitHub does:

>>> r = requests.get('http://github.com')
>>> r.url
'https://github.com/'
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.history
[<Response [301]>]

The Response.history list contains the Request objects that were created in order to complete the request. The list is sorted from the oldest to the most recent request.

If you’re using GET or OPTIONS, you can disable redirection handling with the allow_redirects parameter:

>>> r = requests.get('http://github.com', allow_redirects=False)
>>> r.status_code
301
>>> r.history
[]

If you’re using POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE or HEAD, you can enable redirection as well:

>>> r = requests.post('http://github.com', allow_redirects=True)
>>> r.url
'https://github.com/'
>>> r.history
[<Response [301]>]

Timeouts

You can tell Requests to stop waiting for a response after a given number of seconds with the timeout parameter:

>>> requests.get('http://github.com', timeout=0.001)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
requests.exceptions.Timeout: HTTPConnectionPool(host='github.com', port=80): Request timed out. (timeout=0.001)

Note

timeout is not a time limit on the entire response download; rather, an exception is raised if the server has not issued a response for timeout seconds (more precisely, if no bytes have been received on the underlying socket for timeout seconds).

Errors and Exceptions

In the event of a network problem (e.g. DNS failure, refused connection, etc), Requests will raise a ConnectionError exception.

In the event of the rare invalid HTTP response, Requests will raise an HTTPError exception.

If a request times out, a Timeout exception is raised.

If a request exceeds the configured number of maximum redirections, a TooManyRedirects exception is raised.

All exceptions that Requests explicitly raises inherit from requests.exceptions.RequestException.


Ready for more? Check out the advanced section.

Advanced Usage

This document covers some of Requests more advanced features.

Session Objects

The Session object allows you to persist certain parameters across requests. It also persists cookies across all requests made from the Session instance.

A Session object has all the methods of the main Requests API.

Let’s persist some cookies across requests:

s = requests.Session()

s.get('http://httpbin.org/cookies/set/sessioncookie/123456789')
r = s.get("http://httpbin.org/cookies")

print r.text
# '{"cookies": {"sessioncookie": "123456789"}}'

Sessions can also be used to provide default data to the request methods. This is done by providing data to the properties on a Session object:

s = requests.Session()
s.auth = ('user', 'pass')
s.headers.update({'x-test': 'true'})

# both 'x-test' and 'x-test2' are sent
s.get('http://httpbin.org/headers', headers={'x-test2': 'true'})

Any dictionaries that you pass to a request method will be merged with the session-level values that are set. The method-level parameters override session parameters.

Remove a Value From a Dict Parameter

Sometimes you’ll want to omit session-level keys from a dict parameter. To do this, you simply set that key’s value to None in the method-level parameter. It will automatically be omitted.

All values that are contained within a session are directly available to you. See the Session API Docs to learn more.

Request and Response Objects

Whenever a call is made to requests.*() you are doing two major things. First, you are constructing a Request object which will be sent off to a server to request or query some resource. Second, a Response object is generated once requests gets a response back from the server. The Response object contains all of the information returned by the server and also contains the Request object you created originally. Here is a simple request to get some very important information from Wikipedia’s servers:

>>> r = requests.get('http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python')

If we want to access the headers the server sent back to us, we do this:

>>> r.headers
{'content-length': '56170', 'x-content-type-options': 'nosniff', 'x-cache':
'HIT from cp1006.eqiad.wmnet, MISS from cp1010.eqiad.wmnet', 'content-encoding':
'gzip', 'age': '3080', 'content-language': 'en', 'vary': 'Accept-Encoding,Cookie',
'server': 'Apache', 'last-modified': 'Wed, 13 Jun 2012 01:33:50 GMT',
'connection': 'close', 'cache-control': 'private, s-maxage=0, max-age=0,
must-revalidate', 'date': 'Thu, 14 Jun 2012 12:59:39 GMT', 'content-type':
'text/html; charset=UTF-8', 'x-cache-lookup': 'HIT from cp1006.eqiad.wmnet:3128,
MISS from cp1010.eqiad.wmnet:80'}

However, if we want to get the headers we sent the server, we simply access the request, and then the request’s headers:

>>> r.request.headers
{'Accept-Encoding': 'identity, deflate, compress, gzip',
'Accept': '*/*', 'User-Agent': 'python-requests/1.2.0'}

Prepared Requests

Whenever you receive a Response object from an API call or a Session call, the request attribute is actually the PreparedRequest that was used. In some cases you may wish to do some extra work to the body or headers (or anything else really) before sending a request. The simple recipe for this is the following:

from requests import Request, Session

s = Session()
prepped = Request('GET',  # or any other method, 'POST', 'PUT', etc.
                  url,
                  data=data
                  headers=headers
                  # ...
                  ).prepare()
# do something with prepped.body
# do something with prepped.headers
resp = s.send(prepped,
              stream=stream,
              verify=verify,
              proxies=proxies,
              cert=cert,
              timeout=timeout,
              # etc.
              )
print(resp.status_code)

Since you are not doing anything special with the Request object, you prepare it immediately and modified the PreparedRequest object. You then send that with the other parameters you would have sent to requests.* or Sesssion.*.

SSL Cert Verification

Requests can verify SSL certificates for HTTPS requests, just like a web browser. To check a host’s SSL certificate, you can use the verify argument:

>>> requests.get('https://kennethreitz.com', verify=True)
requests.exceptions.SSLError: hostname 'kennethreitz.com' doesn't match either of '*.herokuapp.com', 'herokuapp.com'

I don’t have SSL setup on this domain, so it fails. Excellent. GitHub does though:

>>> requests.get('https://github.com', verify=True)
<Response [200]>

You can also pass verify the path to a CA_BUNDLE file for private certs. You can also set the REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE environment variable.

Requests can also ignore verifying the SSL certificate if you set verify to False.

>>> requests.get('https://kennethreitz.com', verify=False)
<Response [200]>

By default, verify is set to True. Option verify only applies to host certs.

You can also specify a local cert to use as client side certificate, as a single file (containing the private key and the certificate) or as a tuple of both file’s path:

>>> requests.get('https://kennethreitz.com', cert=('/path/server.crt', '/path/key'))
<Response [200]>

If you specify a wrong path or an invalid cert:

>>> requests.get('https://kennethreitz.com', cert='/wrong_path/server.pem')
SSLError: [Errno 336265225] _ssl.c:347: error:140B0009:SSL routines:SSL_CTX_use_PrivateKey_file:PEM lib

Body Content Workflow

By default, when you make a request, the body of the response is downloaded immediately. You can override this behavior and defer downloading the response body until you access the Response.content attribute with the stream parameter:

tarball_url = 'https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/tarball/master'
r = requests.get(tarball_url, stream=True)

At this point only the response headers have been downloaded and the connection remains open, hence allowing us to make content retrieval conditional:

if int(r.headers['content-length']) < TOO_LONG:
  content = r.content
  ...

You can further control the workflow by use of the Response.iter_content and Response.iter_lines methods. Alternatively, you can read the undecoded body from the underlying urllib3 urllib3.HTTPResponse at Response.raw.

Keep-Alive

Excellent news — thanks to urllib3, keep-alive is 100% automatic within a session! Any requests that you make within a session will automatically reuse the appropriate connection!

Note that connections are only released back to the pool for reuse once all body data has been read; be sure to either set stream to False or read the content property of the Response object.

Streaming Uploads

Requests supports streaming uploads, which allow you to send large streams or files without reading them into memory. To stream and upload, simply provide a file-like object for your body:

with open('massive-body') as f:
    requests.post('http://some.url/streamed', data=f)

Chunk-Encoded Requests

Requests also supports Chunked transfer encoding for outgoing and incoming requests. To send a chunk-encoded request, simply provide a generator (or any iterator without a length) for your body:

def gen():
    yield 'hi'
    yield 'there'

requests.post('http://some.url/chunked', data=gen())

Event Hooks

Requests has a hook system that you can use to manipulate portions of the request process, or signal event handling.

Available hooks:

response:
The response generated from a Request.

You can assign a hook function on a per-request basis by passing a {hook_name: callback_function} dictionary to the hooks request parameter:

hooks=dict(response=print_url)

That callback_function will receive a chunk of data as its first argument.

def print_url(r, *args, **kwargs):
    print(r.url)

If an error occurs while executing your callback, a warning is given.

If the callback function returns a value, it is assumed that it is to replace the data that was passed in. If the function doesn’t return anything, nothing else is effected.

Let’s print some request method arguments at runtime:

>>> requests.get('http://httpbin.org', hooks=dict(response=print_url))
http://httpbin.org
<Response [200]>

Custom Authentication

Requests allows you to use specify your own authentication mechanism.

Any callable which is passed as the auth argument to a request method will have the opportunity to modify the request before it is dispatched.

Authentication implementations are subclasses of requests.auth.AuthBase, and are easy to define. Requests provides two common authentication scheme implementations in requests.auth: HTTPBasicAuth and HTTPDigestAuth.

Let’s pretend that we have a web service that will only respond if the X-Pizza header is set to a password value. Unlikely, but just go with it.

from requests.auth import AuthBase

class PizzaAuth(AuthBase):
    """Attaches HTTP Pizza Authentication to the given Request object."""
    def __init__(self, username):
        # setup any auth-related data here
        self.username = username

    def __call__(self, r):
        # modify and return the request
        r.headers['X-Pizza'] = self.username
        return r

Then, we can make a request using our Pizza Auth:

>>> requests.get('http://pizzabin.org/admin', auth=PizzaAuth('kenneth'))
<Response [200]>

Streaming Requests

With requests.Response.iter_lines() you can easily iterate over streaming APIs such as the Twitter Streaming API.

To use the Twitter Streaming API to track the keyword “requests”:

import json
import requests

r = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/stream/20', stream=True)

for line in r.iter_lines():

    # filter out keep-alive new lines
    if line:
        print json.loads(line)

Proxies

If you need to use a proxy, you can configure individual requests with the proxies argument to any request method:

import requests

proxies = {
  "http": "http://10.10.1.10:3128",
  "https": "http://10.10.1.10:1080",
}

requests.get("http://example.org", proxies=proxies)

You can also configure proxies by environment variables HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY.

$ export HTTP_PROXY="http://10.10.1.10:3128"
$ export HTTPS_PROXY="http://10.10.1.10:1080"
$ python
>>> import requests
>>> requests.get("http://example.org")

To use HTTP Basic Auth with your proxy, use the http://user:password@host/ syntax:

proxies = {
    "http": "http://user:pass@10.10.1.10:3128/",
}

Compliance

Requests is intended to be compliant with all relevant specifications and RFCs where that compliance will not cause difficulties for users. This attention to the specification can lead to some behaviour that may seem unusual to those not familiar with the relevant specification.

Encodings

When you receive a response, Requests makes a guess at the encoding to use for decoding the response when you call the Response.text method. Requests will first check for an encoding in the HTTP header, and if none is present, will use charade to attempt to guess the encoding.

The only time Requests will not do this is if no explicit charset is present in the HTTP headers and the Content-Type header contains text. In this situation, RFC 2616 specifies that the default charset must be ISO-8859-1. Requests follows the specification in this case. If you require a different encoding, you can manually set the Response.encoding property, or use the raw Response.content.

HTTP Verbs

Requests provides access to almost the full range of HTTP verbs: GET, OPTIONS, HEAD, POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE. The following provides detailed examples of using these various verbs in Requests, using the GitHub API.

We will begin with the verb most commonly used: GET. HTTP GET is an idempotent method that returns a resource from a given URL. As a result, it is the verb you ought to use when attempting to retrieve data from a web location. An example usage would be attempting to get information about a specific commit from GitHub. Suppose we wanted commit a050faf on Requests. We would get it like so:

>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/repos/kennethreitz/requests/git/commits/a050faf084662f3a352dd1a941f2c7c9f886d4ad')

We should confirm that GitHub responded correctly. If it has, we want to work out what type of content it is. Do this like so:

>>> if (r.status_code == requests.codes.ok):
...     print r.headers['content-type']
...
application/json; charset=utf-8

So, GitHub returns JSON. That’s great, we can use the r.json method to parse it into Python objects.

>>> commit_data = r.json()
>>> print commit_data.keys()
[u'committer', u'author', u'url', u'tree', u'sha', u'parents', u'message']
>>> print commit_data[u'committer']
{u'date': u'2012-05-10T11:10:50-07:00', u'email': u'me@kennethreitz.com', u'name': u'Kenneth Reitz'}
>>> print commit_data[u'message']
makin' history

So far, so simple. Well, let’s investigate the GitHub API a little bit. Now, we could look at the documentation, but we might have a little more fun if we use Requests instead. We can take advantage of the Requests OPTIONS verb to see what kinds of HTTP methods are supported on the url we just used.

>>> verbs = requests.options(r.url)
>>> verbs.status_code
500

Uh, what? That’s unhelpful! Turns out GitHub, like many API providers, don’t actually implement the OPTIONS method. This is an annoying oversight, but it’s OK, we can just use the boring documentation. If GitHub had correctly implemented OPTIONS, however, they should return the allowed methods in the headers, e.g.

>>> verbs = requests.options('http://a-good-website.com/api/cats')
>>> print verbs.headers['allow']
GET,HEAD,POST,OPTIONS

Turning to the documentation, we see that the only other method allowed for commits is POST, which creates a new commit. As we’re using the Requests repo, we should probably avoid making ham-handed POSTS to it. Instead, let’s play with the Issues feature of GitHub.

This documentation was added in response to Issue #482. Given that this issue already exists, we will use it as an example. Let’s start by getting it.

>>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/repos/kennethreitz/requests/issues/482')
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> issue = json.loads(r.text)
>>> print issue[u'title']
Feature any http verb in docs
>>> print issue[u'comments']
3

Cool, we have three comments. Let’s take a look at the last of them.

>>> r = requests.get(r.url + u'/comments')
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> comments = r.json()
>>> print comments[0].keys()
[u'body', u'url', u'created_at', u'updated_at', u'user', u'id']
>>> print comments[2][u'body']
Probably in the "advanced" section

Well, that seems like a silly place. Let’s post a comment telling the poster that he’s silly. Who is the poster, anyway?

>>> print comments[2][u'user'][u'login']
kennethreitz

OK, so let’s tell this Kenneth guy that we think this example should go in the quickstart guide instead. According to the GitHub API doc, the way to do this is to POST to the thread. Let’s do it.

>>> body = json.dumps({u"body": u"Sounds great! I'll get right on it!"})
>>> url = u"https://api.github.com/repos/kennethreitz/requests/issues/482/comments"
>>> r = requests.post(url=url, data=body)
>>> r.status_code
404

Huh, that’s weird. We probably need to authenticate. That’ll be a pain, right? Wrong. Requests makes it easy to use many forms of authentication, including the very common Basic Auth.

>>> from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth
>>> auth = HTTPBasicAuth('fake@example.com', 'not_a_real_password')
>>> r = requests.post(url=url, data=body, auth=auth)
>>> r.status_code
201
>>> content = r.json()
>>> print content[u'body']
Sounds great! I'll get right on it.

Brilliant. Oh, wait, no! I meant to add that it would take me a while, because I had to go feed my cat. If only I could edit this comment! Happily, GitHub allows us to use another HTTP verb, PATCH, to edit this comment. Let’s do that.

>>> print content[u"id"]
5804413
>>> body = json.dumps({u"body": u"Sounds great! I'll get right on it once I feed my cat."})
>>> url = u"https://api.github.com/repos/kennethreitz/requests/issues/comments/5804413"
>>> r = requests.patch(url=url, data=body, auth=auth)
>>> r.status_code
200

Excellent. Now, just to torture this Kenneth guy, I’ve decided to let him sweat and not tell him that I’m working on this. That means I want to delete this comment. GitHub lets us delete comments using the incredibly aptly named DELETE method. Let’s get rid of it.

>>> r = requests.delete(url=url, auth=auth)
>>> r.status_code
204
>>> r.headers['status']
'204 No Content'

Excellent. All gone. The last thing I want to know is how much of my ratelimit I’ve used. Let’s find out. GitHub sends that information in the headers, so rather than download the whole page I’ll send a HEAD request to get the headers.

>>> r = requests.head(url=url, auth=auth)
>>> print r.headers
...
'x-ratelimit-remaining': '4995'
'x-ratelimit-limit': '5000'
...

Excellent. Time to write a Python program that abuses the GitHub API in all kinds of exciting ways, 4995 more times.

Transport Adapters

As of v1.0.0, Requests has moved to a modular internal design. Part of the reason this was done was to implement Transport Adapters, originally described here. Transport Adapters provide a mechanism to define interaction methods for an HTTP service. In particular, they allow you to apply per-service configuration.

Requests ships with a single Transport Adapter, the HTTPAdapter. This adapter provides the default Requests interaction with HTTP and HTTPS using the powerful urllib3 library. Whenever a Requests Session is initialized, one of these is attached to the Session object for HTTP, and one for HTTPS.

Requests enables users to create and use their own Transport Adapters that provide specific functionality. Once created, a Transport Adapter can be mounted to a Session object, along with an indication of which web services it should apply to.

>>> s = requests.Session()
>>> s.mount('http://www.github.com', MyAdapter())

The mount call registers a specific instance of a Transport Adapter to a prefix. Once mounted, any HTTP request made using that session whose URL starts with the given prefix will use the given Transport Adapter.

Implementing a Transport Adapter is beyond the scope of this documentation, but a good start would be to subclass the requests.adapters.BaseAdapter class.

Blocking Or Non-Blocking?

With the default Transport Adapter in place, Requests does not provide any kind of non-blocking IO. The Response.content property will block until the entire response has been downloaded. If you require more granularity, the streaming features of the library (see streaming-requests) allow you to retrieve smaller quantities of the response at a time. However, these calls will still block.

If you are concerned about the use of blocking IO, there are lots of projects out there that combine Requests with one of Python’s asynchronicity frameworks. Two excellent examples are grequests and requests-futures.

Authentication

This document discusses using various kinds of authentication with Requests.

Many web services require authentication, and there are many different types. Below, we outline various forms of authentication available in Requests, from the simple to the complex.

Basic Authentication

Many web services that require authentication accept HTTP Basic Auth. This is the simplest kind, and Requests supports it straight out of the box.

Making requests with HTTP Basic Auth is very simple:

>>> from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth
>>> requests.get('https://api.github.com/user', auth=HTTPBasicAuth('user', 'pass'))
<Response [200]>

In fact, HTTP Basic Auth is so common that Requests provides a handy shorthand for using it:

>>> requests.get('https://api.github.com/user', auth=('user', 'pass'))
<Response [200]>

Providing the credentials in a tuple like this is exactly the same as the HTTPBasicAuth example above.

netrc Authentication

If no authentication method is given with the auth argument, Requests will attempt to get the authentication credentials for the URL’s hostname from the user’s netrc file.

If credentials for the hostname are found, the request is sent with HTTP Basic Auth.

Digest Authentication

Another very popular form of HTTP Authentication is Digest Authentication, and Requests supports this out of the box as well:

>>> from requests.auth import HTTPDigestAuth
>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/digest-auth/auth/user/pass'
>>> requests.get(url, auth=HTTPDigestAuth('user', 'pass'))
<Response [200]>

OAuth 1 Authentication

A common form of authentication for several web APIs is OAuth. The requests-oauthlib library allows Requests users to easily make OAuth authenticated requests:

>>> import requests
>>> from requests_oauthlib import OAuth1

>>> url = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/account/verify_credentials.json'
>>> auth = OAuth1('YOUR_APP_KEY', 'YOUR_APP_SECRET',
                  'USER_OAUTH_TOKEN', 'USER_OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET')

>>> requests.get(url, auth=auth)
<Response [200]>

For more information on how to OAuth flow works, please see the official OAuth website. For examples and documentation on requests-oauthlib, please see the requests_oauthlib repository on GitHub

Other Authentication

Requests is designed to allow other forms of authentication to be easily and quickly plugged in. Members of the open-source community frequently write authentication handlers for more complicated or less commonly-used forms of authentication. Some of the best have been brought together under the Requests organization, including:

If you want to use any of these forms of authentication, go straight to their GitHub page and follow the instructions.

New Forms of Authentication

If you can’t find a good implementation of the form of authentication you want, you can implement it yourself. Requests makes it easy to add your own forms of authentication.

To do so, subclass requests.auth.AuthBase and implement the __call__() method:

>>> import requests
>>> class MyAuth(requests.auth.AuthBase):
...     def __call__(self, r):
...         # Implement my authentication
...         return r
...
>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/get'
>>> requests.get(url, auth=MyAuth())
<Response [200]>

When an authentication handler is attached to a request, it is called during request setup. The __call__ method must therefore do whatever is required to make the authentication work. Some forms of authentication will additionally add hooks to provide further functionality.

Further examples can be found under the Requests organization and in the auth.py file.

Community Guide

This part of the documentation, which is mostly prose, details the Requests ecosystem and community.

Frequently Asked Questions

This part of the documentation answers common questions about Requests.

Encoded Data?

Requests automatically decompresses gzip-encoded responses, and does its best to decode response content to unicode when possible.

You can get direct access to the raw response (and even the socket), if needed as well.

Custom User-Agents?

Requests allows you to easily override User-Agent strings, along with any other HTTP Header.

Why not Httplib2?

Chris Adams gave an excellent summary on Hacker News:

httplib2 is part of why you should use requests: it’s far more respectable as a client but not as well documented and it still takes way too much code for basic operations. I appreciate what httplib2 is trying to do, that there’s a ton of hard low-level annoyances in building a modern HTTP client, but really, just use requests instead. Kenneth Reitz is very motivated and he gets the degree to which simple things should be simple whereas httplib2 feels more like an academic exercise than something people should use to build production systems[1].

Disclosure: I’m listed in the requests AUTHORS file but can claim credit for, oh, about 0.0001% of the awesomeness.

1. http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/issues/detail?id=96 is a good example: an annoying bug which affect many people, there was a fix available for months, which worked great when I applied it in a fork and pounded a couple TB of data through it, but it took over a year to make it into trunk and even longer to make it onto PyPI where any other project which required ” httplib2” would get the working version.

Python 3 Support?

Yes! Here’s a list of Python platforms that are officially supported:

  • Python 2.6
  • Python 2.7
  • Python 3.1
  • Python 3.2
  • Python 3.3
  • PyPy 1.9

Integrations

ScraperWiki

ScraperWiki is an excellent service that allows you to run Python, Ruby, and PHP scraper scripts on the web. Now, Requests v0.6.1 is available to use in your scrapers!

To give it a try, simply:

import requests

Python for iOS

Requests is built into the wonderful Python for iOS runtime!

To give it a try, simply:

import requests

Support

If you have questions or issues about Requests, there are several options:

Send a Tweet

If your question is less than 140 characters, feel free to send a tweet to @kennethreitz.

File an Issue

If you notice some unexpected behavior in Requests, or want to see support for a new feature, file an issue on GitHub.

E-mail

I’m more than happy to answer any personal or in-depth questions about Requests. Feel free to email requests@kennethreitz.com.

IRC

The official Freenode channel for Requests is #python-requests

I’m also available as kennethreitz on Freenode.

Community Updates

If you’d like to stay up to date on the community and development of Requests, there are several options:

GitHub

The best way to track the development of Requests is through the GitHub repo.

Twitter

I often tweet about new features and releases of Requests.

Follow @kennethreitz for updates.

Mailing List

There’s a low-volume mailing list for Requests. To subscribe to the mailing list, send an email to requests@librelist.org.

Software Updates

Release History

2.0.0 (2013-09-24)

API Changes:

  • Keys in the Headers dictionary are now native strings on all Python versions, i.e. bytestrings on Python 2, unicode on Python 3.
  • Proxy URLs now must have an explicit scheme. A MissingSchema exception will be raised if they don’t.
  • Timeouts now apply to read time if Stream=False.
  • RequestException is now a subclass of IOError, not RuntimeError.
  • Added new method to PreparedRequest objects: PreparedRequest.copy().
  • Added new method to Session objects: Session.update_request(). This method updates a Request object with the data (e.g. cookies) stored on the Session.
  • Added new method to Session objects: Session.prepare_request(). This method updates and prepares a Request object, and returns the corresponding PreparedRequest object.
  • Added new method to HTTPAdapter objects: HTTPAdapter.proxy_headers(). This should not be called directly, but improves the subclass interface.
  • httplib.IncompleteRead exceptions caused by incorrect chunked encoding will now raise a Requests ChunkedEncodingError instead.
  • Invalid percent-escape sequences now cause a Requests InvalidURL exception to be raised.
  • HTTP 208 no longer uses reason phrase "im_used". Correctly uses "already_reported".
  • HTTP 226 reason added ("im_used").

Bugfixes:

  • Vastly improved proxy support, including the CONNECT verb. Special thanks to the many contributors who worked towards this improvement.
  • Cookies are now properly managed when 401 authentication responses are received.
  • Chunked encoding fixes.
  • Support for mixed case schemes.
  • Better handling of streaming downloads.
  • Retrieve environment proxies from more locations.
  • Minor cookies fixes.
  • Imroved redirect behaviour.
  • Improved streaming behaviour, particularly for compressed data.
  • Miscellaneous small Python 3 text encoding bugs.
  • .netrc no longer overrides explicit auth.
  • Cookies set by hooks are now correctly persisted on Sessions.
  • Fix problem with cookies that specify port numbers in their host field.
  • BytesIO can be used to perform streaming uploads.
  • More generous parsing of the no_proxy environment variable.
  • Non-string objects can be passed in data values alongside files.
1.2.3 (2013-05-25)
  • Simple packaging fix
1.2.2 (2013-05-23)
  • Simple packaging fix
1.2.1 (2013-05-20)
  • Python 3.3.2 compatibility
  • Always percent-encode location headers
  • Fix connection adapter matching to be most-specific first
  • new argument to the default connection adapter for passing a block argument
  • prevent a KeyError when there’s no link headers
1.2.0 (2013-03-31)
  • Fixed cookies on sessions and on requests
  • Significantly change how hooks are dispatched - hooks now receive all the arguments specified by the user when making a request so hooks can make a secondary request with the same parameters. This is especially necessary for authentication handler authors
  • certifi support was removed
  • Fixed bug where using OAuth 1 with body signature_type sent no data
  • Major proxy work thanks to @Lukasa including parsing of proxy authentication from the proxy url
  • Fix DigestAuth handling too many 401s
  • Update vendored urllib3 to include SSL bug fixes
  • Allow keyword arguments to be passed to json.loads() via the Response.json() method
  • Don’t send Content-Length header by default on GET or HEAD requests
  • Add elapsed attribute to Response objects to time how long a request took.
  • Fix RequestsCookieJar
  • Sessions and Adapters are now picklable, i.e., can be used with the multiprocessing library
  • Update charade to version 1.0.3

The change in how hooks are dispatched will likely cause a great deal of issues.

1.1.0 (2013-01-10)
  • CHUNKED REQUESTS
  • Support for iterable response bodies
  • Assume servers persist redirect params
  • Allow explicit content types to be specified for file data
  • Make merge_kwargs case-insensitive when looking up keys
1.0.3 (2012-12-18)
  • Fix file upload encoding bug
  • Fix cookie behavior
1.0.2 (2012-12-17)
  • Proxy fix for HTTPAdapter.
1.0.1 (2012-12-17)
  • Cert verification exception bug.
  • Proxy fix for HTTPAdapter.
1.0.0 (2012-12-17)
  • Massive Refactor and Simplification
  • Switch to Apache 2.0 license
  • Swappable Connection Adapters
  • Mountable Connection Adapters
  • Mutable ProcessedRequest chain
  • /s/prefetch/stream
  • Removal of all configuration
  • Standard library logging
  • Make Response.json() callable, not property.
  • Usage of new charade project, which provides python 2 and 3 simultaneous chardet.
  • Removal of all hooks except ‘response’
  • Removal of all authentication helpers (OAuth, Kerberos)

This is not a backwards compatible change.

0.14.2 (2012-10-27)
  • Improved mime-compatible JSON handling
  • Proxy fixes
  • Path hack fixes
  • Case-Insensistive Content-Encoding headers
  • Support for CJK parameters in form posts
0.14.1 (2012-10-01)
  • Python 3.3 Compatibility
  • Simply default accept-encoding
  • Bugfixes
0.14.0 (2012-09-02)
  • No more iter_content errors if already downloaded.
0.13.9 (2012-08-25)
  • Fix for OAuth + POSTs
  • Remove exception eating from dispatch_hook
  • General bugfixes
0.13.8 (2012-08-21)
  • Incredible Link header support :)
0.13.7 (2012-08-19)
  • Support for (key, value) lists everywhere.
  • Digest Authentication improvements.
  • Ensure proxy exclusions work properly.
  • Clearer UnicodeError exceptions.
  • Automatic casting of URLs to tsrings (fURL and such)
  • Bugfixes.
0.13.6 (2012-08-06)
  • Long awaited fix for hanging connections!
0.13.5 (2012-07-27)
  • Packaging fix
0.13.4 (2012-07-27)
  • GSSAPI/Kerberos authentication!
  • App Engine 2.7 Fixes!
  • Fix leaking connections (from urllib3 update)
  • OAuthlib path hack fix
  • OAuthlib URL parameters fix.
0.13.3 (2012-07-12)
  • Use simplejson if available.
  • Do not hide SSLErrors behind Timeouts.
  • Fixed param handling with urls containing fragments.
  • Significantly improved information in User Agent.
  • client certificates are ignored when verify=False
0.13.2 (2012-06-28)
  • Zero dependencies (once again)!
  • New: Response.reason
  • Sign querystring parameters in OAuth 1.0
  • Client certificates no longer ignored when verify=False
  • Add openSUSE certificate support
0.13.1 (2012-06-07)
  • Allow passing a file or file-like object as data.
  • Allow hooks to return responses that indicate errors.
  • Fix Response.text and Response.json for body-less responses.
0.13.0 (2012-05-29)
  • Removal of Requests.async in favor of grequests
  • Allow disabling of cookie persistiance.
  • New implimentation of safe_mode
  • cookies.get now supports default argument
  • Session cookies not saved when Session.request is called with return_response=False
  • Env: no_proxy support.
  • RequestsCookieJar improvements.
  • Various bug fixes.
0.12.1 (2012-05-08)
  • New Response.json property.
  • Ability to add string file uploads.
  • Fix out-of-range issue with iter_lines.
  • Fix iter_content default size.
  • Fix POST redirects containing files.
0.12.0 (2012-05-02)
  • EXPERIMENTAL OAUTH SUPPORT!
  • Proper CookieJar-backed cookies interface with awesome dict-like interface.
  • Speed fix for non-iterated content chunks.
  • Move pre_request to a more usable place.
  • New pre_send hook.
  • Lazily encode data, params, files.
  • Load system Certificate Bundle if certify isn’t available.
  • Cleanups, fixes.
0.11.2 (2012-04-22)
  • Attempt to use the OS’s certificate bundle if certifi isn’t available.
  • Infinite digest auth redirect fix.
  • Multi-part file upload improvements.
  • Fix decoding of invalid %encodings in URLs.
  • If there is no content in a response don’t throw an error the second time that content is attempted to be read.
  • Upload data on redirects.
0.11.1 (2012-03-30)
  • POST redirects now break RFC to do what browsers do: Follow up with a GET.
  • New strict_mode configuration to disable new redirect behavior.
0.11.0 (2012-03-14)
  • Private SSL Certificate support
  • Remove select.poll from Gevent monkeypatching
  • Remove redundant generator for chunked transfer encoding
  • Fix: Response.ok raises Timeout Exception in safe_mode
0.10.8 (2012-03-09)
  • Generate chunked ValueError fix
  • Proxy configuration by environment variables
  • Simplification of iter_lines.
  • New trust_env configuration for disabling system/environment hints.
  • Suppress cookie errors.
0.10.7 (2012-03-07)
  • encode_uri = False
0.10.6 (2012-02-25)
  • Allow ‘=’ in cookies.
0.10.5 (2012-02-25)
  • Response body with 0 content-length fix.
  • New async.imap.
  • Don’t fail on netrc.
0.10.4 (2012-02-20)
  • Honor netrc.
0.10.3 (2012-02-20)
  • HEAD requests don’t follow redirects anymore.
  • raise_for_status() doesn’t raise for 3xx anymore.
  • Make Session objects picklable.
  • ValueError for invalid schema URLs.
0.10.2 (2012-01-15)
  • Vastly improved URL quoting.
  • Additional allowed cookie key values.
  • Attempted fix for “Too many open files” Error
  • Replace unicode errors on first pass, no need for second pass.
  • Append ‘/’ to bare-domain urls before query insertion.
  • Exceptions now inherit from RuntimeError.
  • Binary uploads + auth fix.
  • Bugfixes.
0.10.1 (2012-01-23)
  • PYTHON 3 SUPPORT!
  • Dropped 2.5 Support. (Backwards Incompatible)
0.10.0 (2012-01-21)
  • Response.content is now bytes-only. (Backwards Incompatible)
  • New Response.text is unicode-only.
  • If no Response.encoding is specified and chardet is available, Respoonse.text will guess an encoding.
  • Default to ISO-8859-1 (Western) encoding for “text” subtypes.
  • Removal of decode_unicode. (Backwards Incompatible)
  • New multiple-hooks system.
  • New Response.register_hook for registering hooks within the pipeline.
  • Response.url is now Unicode.
0.9.3 (2012-01-18)
  • SSL verify=False bugfix (apparent on windows machines).
0.9.2 (2012-01-18)
  • Asynchronous async.send method.
  • Support for proper chunk streams with boundaries.
  • session argument for Session classes.
  • Print entire hook tracebacks, not just exception instance.
  • Fix response.iter_lines from pending next line.
  • Fix but in HTTP-digest auth w/ URI having query strings.
  • Fix in Event Hooks section.
  • Urllib3 update.
0.9.1 (2012-01-06)
  • danger_mode for automatic Response.raise_for_status()
  • Response.iter_lines refactor
0.9.0 (2011-12-28)
  • verify ssl is default.
0.8.9 (2011-12-28)
  • Packaging fix.
0.8.8 (2011-12-28)
  • SSL CERT VERIFICATION!
  • Release of Cerifi: Mozilla’s cert list.
  • New ‘verify’ argument for SSL requests.
  • Urllib3 update.
0.8.7 (2011-12-24)
  • iter_lines last-line truncation fix
  • Force safe_mode for async requests
  • Handle safe_mode exceptions more consistently
  • Fix iteration on null responses in safe_mode
0.8.6 (2011-12-18)
  • Socket timeout fixes.
  • Proxy Authorization support.
0.8.5 (2011-12-14)
  • Response.iter_lines!
0.8.4 (2011-12-11)
  • Prefetch bugfix.
  • Added license to installed version.
0.8.3 (2011-11-27)
  • Converted auth system to use simpler callable objects.
  • New session parameter to API methods.
  • Display full URL while logging.
0.8.2 (2011-11-19)
  • New Unicode decoding system, based on over-ridable Response.encoding.
  • Proper URL slash-quote handling.
  • Cookies with [, ], and _ allowed.
0.8.1 (2011-11-15)
  • URL Request path fix
  • Proxy fix.
  • Timeouts fix.
0.8.0 (2011-11-13)
  • Keep-alive support!
  • Complete removal of Urllib2
  • Complete removal of Poster
  • Complete removal of CookieJars
  • New ConnectionError raising
  • Safe_mode for error catching
  • prefetch parameter for request methods
  • OPTION method
  • Async pool size throttling
  • File uploads send real names
  • Vendored in urllib3
0.7.6 (2011-11-07)
  • Digest authentication bugfix (attach query data to path)
0.7.5 (2011-11-04)
  • Response.content = None if there was an invalid repsonse.
  • Redirection auth handling.
0.7.4 (2011-10-26)
  • Session Hooks fix.
0.7.3 (2011-10-23)
  • Digest Auth fix.
0.7.2 (2011-10-23)
  • PATCH Fix.
0.7.1 (2011-10-23)
  • Move away from urllib2 authentication handling.
  • Fully Remove AuthManager, AuthObject, &c.
  • New tuple-based auth system with handler callbacks.
0.7.0 (2011-10-22)
  • Sessions are now the primary interface.
  • Deprecated InvalidMethodException.
  • PATCH fix.
  • New config system (no more global settings).
0.6.6 (2011-10-19)
  • Session parameter bugfix (params merging).
0.6.5 (2011-10-18)
  • Offline (fast) test suite.
  • Session dictionary argument merging.
0.6.4 (2011-10-13)
  • Automatic decoding of unicode, based on HTTP Headers.
  • New decode_unicode setting.
  • Removal of r.read/close methods.
  • New r.faw interface for advanced response usage.*
  • Automatic expansion of parameterized headers.
0.6.3 (2011-10-13)
  • Beautiful requests.async module, for making async requests w/ gevent.
0.6.2 (2011-10-09)
  • GET/HEAD obeys allow_redirects=False.
0.6.1 (2011-08-20)
  • Enhanced status codes experience \o/
  • Set a maximum number of redirects (settings.max_redirects)
  • Full Unicode URL support
  • Support for protocol-less redirects.
  • Allow for arbitrary request types.
  • Bugfixes
0.6.0 (2011-08-17)
  • New callback hook system
  • New persistient sessions object and context manager
  • Transparent Dict-cookie handling
  • Status code reference object
  • Removed Response.cached
  • Added Response.request
  • All args are kwargs
  • Relative redirect support
  • HTTPError handling improvements
  • Improved https testing
  • Bugfixes
0.5.1 (2011-07-23)
  • International Domain Name Support!
  • Access headers without fetching entire body (read())
  • Use lists as dicts for parameters
  • Add Forced Basic Authentication
  • Forced Basic is default authentication type
  • python-requests.org default User-Agent header
  • CaseInsensitiveDict lower-case caching
  • Response.history bugfix
0.5.0 (2011-06-21)
  • PATCH Support
  • Support for Proxies
  • HTTPBin Test Suite
  • Redirect Fixes
  • settings.verbose stream writing
  • Querystrings for all methods
  • URLErrors (Connection Refused, Timeout, Invalid URLs) are treated as explicity raised r.requests.get('hwe://blah'); r.raise_for_status()
0.4.1 (2011-05-22)
  • Improved Redirection Handling
  • New ‘allow_redirects’ param for following non-GET/HEAD Redirects
  • Settings module refactoring
0.4.0 (2011-05-15)
  • Response.history: list of redirected responses
  • Case-Insensitive Header Dictionaries!
  • Unicode URLs
0.3.4 (2011-05-14)
  • Urllib2 HTTPAuthentication Recursion fix (Basic/Digest)
  • Internal Refactor
  • Bytes data upload Bugfix
0.3.3 (2011-05-12)
  • Request timeouts
  • Unicode url-encoded data
  • Settings context manager and module
0.3.2 (2011-04-15)
  • Automatic Decompression of GZip Encoded Content
  • AutoAuth Support for Tupled HTTP Auth
0.3.1 (2011-04-01)
  • Cookie Changes
  • Response.read()
  • Poster fix
0.3.0 (2011-02-25)
  • Automatic Authentication API Change

  • Smarter Query URL Parameterization

  • Allow file uploads and POST data together

  • New Authentication Manager System
    • Simpler Basic HTTP System
    • Supports all build-in urllib2 Auths
    • Allows for custom Auth Handlers
0.2.4 (2011-02-19)
  • Python 2.5 Support
  • PyPy-c v1.4 Support
  • Auto-Authentication tests
  • Improved Request object constructor
0.2.3 (2011-02-15)
  • New HTTPHandling Methods
    • Response.__nonzero__ (false if bad HTTP Status)
    • Response.ok (True if expected HTTP Status)
    • Response.error (Logged HTTPError if bad HTTP Status)
    • Response.raise_for_status() (Raises stored HTTPError)
0.2.2 (2011-02-14)
  • Still handles request in the event of an HTTPError. (Issue #2)
  • Eventlet and Gevent Monkeypatch support.
  • Cookie Support (Issue #1)
0.2.1 (2011-02-14)
  • Added file attribute to POST and PUT requests for multipart-encode file uploads.
  • Added Request.url attribute for context and redirects
0.2.0 (2011-02-14)
  • Birth!
0.0.1 (2011-02-13)
  • Frustration
  • Conception

API Documentation

If you are looking for information on a specific function, class or method, this part of the documentation is for you.

Developer Interface

This part of the documentation covers all the interfaces of Requests. For parts where Requests depends on external libraries, we document the most important right here and provide links to the canonical documentation.

Main Interface

All of Requests’ functionality can be accessed by these 7 methods. They all return an instance of the Response object.

requests.request(method, url, **kwargs)

Constructs and sends a Request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • method – method for the new Request object.
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • params – (optional) Dictionary or bytes to be sent in the query string for the Request.
  • data – (optional) Dictionary, bytes, or file-like object to send in the body of the Request.
  • headers – (optional) Dictionary of HTTP Headers to send with the Request.
  • cookies – (optional) Dict or CookieJar object to send with the Request.
  • files – (optional) Dictionary of ‘name’: file-like-objects (or {‘name’: (‘filename’, fileobj)}) for multipart encoding upload.
  • auth – (optional) Auth tuple to enable Basic/Digest/Custom HTTP Auth.
  • timeout – (optional) Float describing the timeout of the request.
  • allow_redirects – (optional) Boolean. Set to True if POST/PUT/DELETE redirect following is allowed.
  • proxies – (optional) Dictionary mapping protocol to the URL of the proxy.
  • verify – (optional) if True, the SSL cert will be verified. A CA_BUNDLE path can also be provided.
  • stream – (optional) if False, the response content will be immediately downloaded.
  • cert – (optional) if String, path to ssl client cert file (.pem). If Tuple, (‘cert’, ‘key’) pair.

Usage:

>>> import requests
>>> req = requests.request('GET', 'http://httpbin.org/get')
<Response [200]>
requests.head(url, **kwargs)

Sends a HEAD request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
requests.get(url, **kwargs)

Sends a GET request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
requests.post(url, data=None, **kwargs)

Sends a POST request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • data – (optional) Dictionary, bytes, or file-like object to send in the body of the Request.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
requests.put(url, data=None, **kwargs)

Sends a PUT request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • data – (optional) Dictionary, bytes, or file-like object to send in the body of the Request.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
requests.patch(url, data=None, **kwargs)

Sends a PATCH request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • data – (optional) Dictionary, bytes, or file-like object to send in the body of the Request.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
requests.delete(url, **kwargs)

Sends a DELETE request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
Lower-Level Classes
class requests.Request(method=None, url=None, headers=None, files=None, data=None, params=None, auth=None, cookies=None, hooks=None)

A user-created Request object.

Used to prepare a PreparedRequest, which is sent to the server.

Parameters:
  • method – HTTP method to use.
  • url – URL to send.
  • headers – dictionary of headers to send.
  • files – dictionary of {filename: fileobject} files to multipart upload.
  • data – the body to attach the request. If a dictionary is provided, form-encoding will take place.
  • params – dictionary of URL parameters to append to the URL.
  • auth – Auth handler or (user, pass) tuple.
  • cookies – dictionary or CookieJar of cookies to attach to this request.
  • hooks – dictionary of callback hooks, for internal usage.

Usage:

>>> import requests
>>> req = requests.Request('GET', 'http://httpbin.org/get')
>>> req.prepare()
<PreparedRequest [GET]>
deregister_hook(event, hook)

Deregister a previously registered hook. Returns True if the hook existed, False if not.

prepare()

Constructs a PreparedRequest for transmission and returns it.

register_hook(event, hook)

Properly register a hook.

class requests.Response

The Response object, which contains a server’s response to an HTTP request.

apparent_encoding

The apparent encoding, provided by the lovely Charade library (Thanks, Ian!).

close()

Closes the underlying file descriptor and releases the connection back to the pool.

Note: Should not normally need to be called explicitly.

content

Content of the response, in bytes.

cookies = None

A CookieJar of Cookies the server sent back.

elapsed = None

The amount of time elapsed between sending the request and the arrival of the response (as a timedelta)

encoding = None

Encoding to decode with when accessing r.text.

headers = None

Case-insensitive Dictionary of Response Headers. For example, headers['content-encoding'] will return the value of a 'Content-Encoding' response header.

history = None

A list of Response objects from the history of the Request. Any redirect responses will end up here. The list is sorted from the oldest to the most recent request.

iter_content(chunk_size=1, decode_unicode=False)

Iterates over the response data. When stream=True is set on the request, this avoids reading the content at once into memory for large responses. The chunk size is the number of bytes it should read into memory. This is not necessarily the length of each item returned as decoding can take place.

iter_lines(chunk_size=512, decode_unicode=None)

Iterates over the response data, one line at a time. When stream=True is set on the request, this avoids reading the content at once into memory for large responses.

json(**kwargs)

Returns the json-encoded content of a response, if any.

Parameters:**kwargs – Optional arguments that json.loads takes.

Returns the parsed header links of the response, if any.

raise_for_status()

Raises stored HTTPError, if one occurred.

raw = None

File-like object representation of response (for advanced usage). Requires that ``stream=True` on the request.

status_code = None

Integer Code of responded HTTP Status.

text

Content of the response, in unicode.

if Response.encoding is None and chardet module is available, encoding will be guessed.

url = None

Final URL location of Response.

Request Sessions

class requests.Session

A Requests session.

Provides cookie persistence, connection-pooling, and configuration.

Basic Usage:

>>> import requests
>>> s = requests.Session()
>>> s.get('http://httpbin.org/get')
200
auth = None

Default Authentication tuple or object to attach to Request.

cert = None

SSL certificate default.

close()

Closes all adapters and as such the session

cookies = None

A CookieJar containing all currently outstanding cookies set on this session. By default it is a RequestsCookieJar, but may be any other cookielib.CookieJar compatible object.

delete(url, **kwargs)

Sends a DELETE request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
get(url, **kwargs)

Sends a GET request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
get_adapter(url)

Returns the appropriate connnection adapter for the given URL.

head(url, **kwargs)

Sends a HEAD request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
headers = None

A case-insensitive dictionary of headers to be sent on each Request sent from this Session.

hooks = None

Event-handling hooks.

max_redirects = None

Maximum number of redirects allowed. If the request exceeds this limit, a TooManyRedirects exception is raised.

mount(prefix, adapter)

Registers a connection adapter to a prefix.

Adapters are sorted in descending order by key length.

options(url, **kwargs)

Sends a OPTIONS request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
params = None

Dictionary of querystring data to attach to each Request. The dictionary values may be lists for representing multivalued query parameters.

patch(url, data=None, **kwargs)

Sends a PATCH request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • data – (optional) Dictionary, bytes, or file-like object to send in the body of the Request.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
post(url, data=None, **kwargs)

Sends a POST request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • data – (optional) Dictionary, bytes, or file-like object to send in the body of the Request.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
prepare_request(request)

Constructs a PreparedRequest for transmission and returns it. The PreparedRequest has settings merged from the Request instance and those of the Session.

Parameters:requestRequest instance to prepare with this

session’s settings.

proxies = None

Dictionary mapping protocol to the URL of the proxy (e.g. {‘http’: ‘foo.bar:3128’}) to be used on each Request.

put(url, data=None, **kwargs)

Sends a PUT request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • data – (optional) Dictionary, bytes, or file-like object to send in the body of the Request.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
request(method, url, params=None, data=None, headers=None, cookies=None, files=None, auth=None, timeout=None, allow_redirects=True, proxies=None, hooks=None, stream=None, verify=None, cert=None)

Constructs a Request, prepares it and sends it. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • method – method for the new Request object.
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • params – (optional) Dictionary or bytes to be sent in the query string for the Request.
  • data – (optional) Dictionary or bytes to send in the body of the Request.
  • headers – (optional) Dictionary of HTTP Headers to send with the Request.
  • cookies – (optional) Dict or CookieJar object to send with the Request.
  • files – (optional) Dictionary of ‘filename’: file-like-objects for multipart encoding upload.
  • auth – (optional) Auth tuple or callable to enable Basic/Digest/Custom HTTP Auth.
  • timeout – (optional) Float describing the timeout of the request.
  • allow_redirects – (optional) Boolean. Set to True by default.
  • proxies – (optional) Dictionary mapping protocol to the URL of the proxy.
  • stream – (optional) whether to immediately download the response content. Defaults to False.
  • verify – (optional) if True, the SSL cert will be verified. A CA_BUNDLE path can also be provided.
  • cert – (optional) if String, path to ssl client cert file (.pem). If Tuple, (‘cert’, ‘key’) pair.
resolve_redirects(resp, req, stream=False, timeout=None, verify=True, cert=None, proxies=None)

Receives a Response. Returns a generator of Responses.

send(request, **kwargs)

Send a given PreparedRequest.

stream = None

Stream response content default.

trust_env = None

Should we trust the environment?

verify = None

SSL Verification default.

class requests.adapters.HTTPAdapter(pool_connections=10, pool_maxsize=10, max_retries=0, pool_block=False)

The built-in HTTP Adapter for urllib3.

Provides a general-case interface for Requests sessions to contact HTTP and HTTPS urls by implementing the Transport Adapter interface. This class will usually be created by the Session class under the covers.

Parameters:
  • pool_connections – The number of urllib3 connection pools to cache.
  • pool_maxsize – The maximum number of connections to save in the pool.
  • max_retries – The maximum number of retries each connection should attempt.
  • pool_block – Whether the connection pool should block for connections.

Usage:

>>> import requests
>>> s = requests.Session()
>>> a = requests.adapters.HTTPAdapter()
>>> s.mount('http://', a)
add_headers(request, **kwargs)

Add any headers needed by the connection. As of v2.0 this does nothing by default, but is left for overriding by users that subclass the HTTPAdapter.

This should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter.

Parameters:
  • request – The PreparedRequest to add headers to.
  • kwargs – The keyword arguments from the call to send().
build_response(req, resp)

Builds a Response object from a urllib3 response. This should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter

Parameters:
  • req – The PreparedRequest used to generate the response.
  • resp – The urllib3 response object.
cert_verify(conn, url, verify, cert)

Verify a SSL certificate. This method should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter.

Parameters:
  • conn – The urllib3 connection object associated with the cert.
  • url – The requested URL.
  • verify – Whether we should actually verify the certificate.
  • cert – The SSL certificate to verify.
close()

Disposes of any internal state.

Currently, this just closes the PoolManager, which closes pooled connections.

get_connection(url, proxies=None)

Returns a urllib3 connection for the given URL. This should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter.

Parameters:
  • url – The URL to connect to.
  • proxies – (optional) A Requests-style dictionary of proxies used on this request.
init_poolmanager(connections, maxsize, block=False)

Initializes a urllib3 PoolManager. This method should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter.

Parameters:
  • connections – The number of urllib3 connection pools to cache.
  • maxsize – The maximum number of connections to save in the pool.
  • block – Block when no free connections are available.
proxy_headers(proxy)

Returns a dictionary of the headers to add to any request sent through a proxy. This works with urllib3 magic to ensure that they are correctly sent to the proxy, rather than in a tunnelled request if CONNECT is being used.

This should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter.

Parameters:
  • proxies – The url of the proxy being used for this request.
  • kwargs – Optional additional keyword arguments.
request_url(request, proxies)

Obtain the url to use when making the final request.

If the message is being sent through a proxy, the full URL has to be used. Otherwise, we should only use the path portion of the URL.

This should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter.

Parameters:
  • request – The PreparedRequest being sent.
  • proxies – A dictionary of schemes to proxy URLs.
send(request, stream=False, timeout=None, verify=True, cert=None, proxies=None)

Sends PreparedRequest object. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • request – The PreparedRequest being sent.
  • stream – (optional) Whether to stream the request content.
  • timeout – (optional) The timeout on the request.
  • verify – (optional) Whether to verify SSL certificates.
  • vert – (optional) Any user-provided SSL certificate to be trusted.
  • proxies – (optional) The proxies dictionary to apply to the request.
Exceptions
exception requests.exceptions.RequestException

There was an ambiguous exception that occurred while handling your request.

exception requests.exceptions.ConnectionError

A Connection error occurred.

exception requests.exceptions.HTTPError(*args, **kwargs)

An HTTP error occurred.

exception requests.exceptions.URLRequired

A valid URL is required to make a request.

exception requests.exceptions.TooManyRedirects

Too many redirects.

Status Code Lookup
requests.codes()

Dictionary lookup object.

>>> requests.codes['temporary_redirect']
307

>>> requests.codes.teapot
418

>>> requests.codes['\o/']
200
Cookies
requests.utils.dict_from_cookiejar(cj)

Returns a key/value dictionary from a CookieJar.

Parameters:cj – CookieJar object to extract cookies from.
requests.utils.cookiejar_from_dict(cookie_dict, cookiejar=None)

Returns a CookieJar from a key/value dictionary.

Parameters:cookie_dict – Dict of key/values to insert into CookieJar.
requests.utils.add_dict_to_cookiejar(cj, cookie_dict)

Returns a CookieJar from a key/value dictionary.

Parameters:
  • cj – CookieJar to insert cookies into.
  • cookie_dict – Dict of key/values to insert into CookieJar.
Encodings
requests.utils.get_encodings_from_content(content)

Returns encodings from given content string.

Parameters:content – bytestring to extract encodings from.
requests.utils.get_encoding_from_headers(headers)

Returns encodings from given HTTP Header Dict.

Parameters:headers – dictionary to extract encoding from.
requests.utils.get_unicode_from_response(r)

Returns the requested content back in unicode.

Parameters:r – Response object to get unicode content from.

Tried:

  1. charset from content-type
  2. every encodings from <meta ... charset=XXX>
  3. fall back and replace all unicode characters
Classes
class requests.Response

The Response object, which contains a server’s response to an HTTP request.

apparent_encoding

The apparent encoding, provided by the lovely Charade library (Thanks, Ian!).

close()

Closes the underlying file descriptor and releases the connection back to the pool.

Note: Should not normally need to be called explicitly.

content

Content of the response, in bytes.

cookies = None

A CookieJar of Cookies the server sent back.

elapsed = None

The amount of time elapsed between sending the request and the arrival of the response (as a timedelta)

encoding = None

Encoding to decode with when accessing r.text.

headers = None

Case-insensitive Dictionary of Response Headers. For example, headers['content-encoding'] will return the value of a 'Content-Encoding' response header.

history = None

A list of Response objects from the history of the Request. Any redirect responses will end up here. The list is sorted from the oldest to the most recent request.

iter_content(chunk_size=1, decode_unicode=False)

Iterates over the response data. When stream=True is set on the request, this avoids reading the content at once into memory for large responses. The chunk size is the number of bytes it should read into memory. This is not necessarily the length of each item returned as decoding can take place.

iter_lines(chunk_size=512, decode_unicode=None)

Iterates over the response data, one line at a time. When stream=True is set on the request, this avoids reading the content at once into memory for large responses.

json(**kwargs)

Returns the json-encoded content of a response, if any.

Parameters:**kwargs – Optional arguments that json.loads takes.
links

Returns the parsed header links of the response, if any.

raise_for_status()

Raises stored HTTPError, if one occurred.

raw = None

File-like object representation of response (for advanced usage). Requires that ``stream=True` on the request.

status_code = None

Integer Code of responded HTTP Status.

text

Content of the response, in unicode.

if Response.encoding is None and chardet module is available, encoding will be guessed.

url = None

Final URL location of Response.

class requests.Request(method=None, url=None, headers=None, files=None, data=None, params=None, auth=None, cookies=None, hooks=None)

A user-created Request object.

Used to prepare a PreparedRequest, which is sent to the server.

Parameters:
  • method – HTTP method to use.
  • url – URL to send.
  • headers – dictionary of headers to send.
  • files – dictionary of {filename: fileobject} files to multipart upload.
  • data – the body to attach the request. If a dictionary is provided, form-encoding will take place.
  • params – dictionary of URL parameters to append to the URL.
  • auth – Auth handler or (user, pass) tuple.
  • cookies – dictionary or CookieJar of cookies to attach to this request.
  • hooks – dictionary of callback hooks, for internal usage.

Usage:

>>> import requests
>>> req = requests.Request('GET', 'http://httpbin.org/get')
>>> req.prepare()
<PreparedRequest [GET]>
deregister_hook(event, hook)

Deregister a previously registered hook. Returns True if the hook existed, False if not.

prepare()

Constructs a PreparedRequest for transmission and returns it.

register_hook(event, hook)

Properly register a hook.

class requests.PreparedRequest

The fully mutable PreparedRequest object, containing the exact bytes that will be sent to the server.

Generated from either a Request object or manually.

Usage:

>>> import requests
>>> req = requests.Request('GET', 'http://httpbin.org/get')
>>> r = req.prepare()
<PreparedRequest [GET]>

>>> s = requests.Session()
>>> s.send(r)
<Response [200]>
body = None

request body to send to the server.

deregister_hook(event, hook)

Deregister a previously registered hook. Returns True if the hook existed, False if not.

headers = None

dictionary of HTTP headers.

hooks = None

dictionary of callback hooks, for internal usage.

method = None

HTTP verb to send to the server.

path_url

Build the path URL to use.

prepare(method=None, url=None, headers=None, files=None, data=None, params=None, auth=None, cookies=None, hooks=None)

Prepares the the entire request with the given parameters.

prepare_auth(auth, url='')

Prepares the given HTTP auth data.

prepare_body(data, files)

Prepares the given HTTP body data.

prepare_cookies(cookies)

Prepares the given HTTP cookie data.

prepare_headers(headers)

Prepares the given HTTP headers.

prepare_hooks(hooks)

Prepares the given hooks.

prepare_method(method)

Prepares the given HTTP method.

prepare_url(url, params)

Prepares the given HTTP URL.

register_hook(event, hook)

Properly register a hook.

url = None

HTTP URL to send the request to.

class requests.Session

A Requests session.

Provides cookie persistence, connection-pooling, and configuration.

Basic Usage:

>>> import requests
>>> s = requests.Session()
>>> s.get('http://httpbin.org/get')
200
auth = None

Default Authentication tuple or object to attach to Request.

cert = None

SSL certificate default.

close()

Closes all adapters and as such the session

cookies = None

A CookieJar containing all currently outstanding cookies set on this session. By default it is a RequestsCookieJar, but may be any other cookielib.CookieJar compatible object.

delete(url, **kwargs)

Sends a DELETE request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
get(url, **kwargs)

Sends a GET request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
get_adapter(url)

Returns the appropriate connnection adapter for the given URL.

head(url, **kwargs)

Sends a HEAD request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
headers = None

A case-insensitive dictionary of headers to be sent on each Request sent from this Session.

hooks = None

Event-handling hooks.

max_redirects = None

Maximum number of redirects allowed. If the request exceeds this limit, a TooManyRedirects exception is raised.

mount(prefix, adapter)

Registers a connection adapter to a prefix.

Adapters are sorted in descending order by key length.

options(url, **kwargs)

Sends a OPTIONS request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
params = None

Dictionary of querystring data to attach to each Request. The dictionary values may be lists for representing multivalued query parameters.

patch(url, data=None, **kwargs)

Sends a PATCH request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • data – (optional) Dictionary, bytes, or file-like object to send in the body of the Request.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
post(url, data=None, **kwargs)

Sends a POST request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • data – (optional) Dictionary, bytes, or file-like object to send in the body of the Request.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
prepare_request(request)

Constructs a PreparedRequest for transmission and returns it. The PreparedRequest has settings merged from the Request instance and those of the Session.

Parameters:requestRequest instance to prepare with this

session’s settings.

proxies = None

Dictionary mapping protocol to the URL of the proxy (e.g. {‘http’: ‘foo.bar:3128’}) to be used on each Request.

put(url, data=None, **kwargs)

Sends a PUT request. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • data – (optional) Dictionary, bytes, or file-like object to send in the body of the Request.
  • **kwargs – Optional arguments that request takes.
request(method, url, params=None, data=None, headers=None, cookies=None, files=None, auth=None, timeout=None, allow_redirects=True, proxies=None, hooks=None, stream=None, verify=None, cert=None)

Constructs a Request, prepares it and sends it. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • method – method for the new Request object.
  • url – URL for the new Request object.
  • params – (optional) Dictionary or bytes to be sent in the query string for the Request.
  • data – (optional) Dictionary or bytes to send in the body of the Request.
  • headers – (optional) Dictionary of HTTP Headers to send with the Request.
  • cookies – (optional) Dict or CookieJar object to send with the Request.
  • files – (optional) Dictionary of ‘filename’: file-like-objects for multipart encoding upload.
  • auth – (optional) Auth tuple or callable to enable Basic/Digest/Custom HTTP Auth.
  • timeout – (optional) Float describing the timeout of the request.
  • allow_redirects – (optional) Boolean. Set to True by default.
  • proxies – (optional) Dictionary mapping protocol to the URL of the proxy.
  • stream – (optional) whether to immediately download the response content. Defaults to False.
  • verify – (optional) if True, the SSL cert will be verified. A CA_BUNDLE path can also be provided.
  • cert – (optional) if String, path to ssl client cert file (.pem). If Tuple, (‘cert’, ‘key’) pair.
resolve_redirects(resp, req, stream=False, timeout=None, verify=True, cert=None, proxies=None)

Receives a Response. Returns a generator of Responses.

send(request, **kwargs)

Send a given PreparedRequest.

stream = None

Stream response content default.

trust_env = None

Should we trust the environment?

verify = None

SSL Verification default.

class requests.adapters.HTTPAdapter(pool_connections=10, pool_maxsize=10, max_retries=0, pool_block=False)

The built-in HTTP Adapter for urllib3.

Provides a general-case interface for Requests sessions to contact HTTP and HTTPS urls by implementing the Transport Adapter interface. This class will usually be created by the Session class under the covers.

Parameters:
  • pool_connections – The number of urllib3 connection pools to cache.
  • pool_maxsize – The maximum number of connections to save in the pool.
  • max_retries – The maximum number of retries each connection should attempt.
  • pool_block – Whether the connection pool should block for connections.

Usage:

>>> import requests
>>> s = requests.Session()
>>> a = requests.adapters.HTTPAdapter()
>>> s.mount('http://', a)
add_headers(request, **kwargs)

Add any headers needed by the connection. As of v2.0 this does nothing by default, but is left for overriding by users that subclass the HTTPAdapter.

This should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter.

Parameters:
  • request – The PreparedRequest to add headers to.
  • kwargs – The keyword arguments from the call to send().
build_response(req, resp)

Builds a Response object from a urllib3 response. This should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter

Parameters:
  • req – The PreparedRequest used to generate the response.
  • resp – The urllib3 response object.
cert_verify(conn, url, verify, cert)

Verify a SSL certificate. This method should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter.

Parameters:
  • conn – The urllib3 connection object associated with the cert.
  • url – The requested URL.
  • verify – Whether we should actually verify the certificate.
  • cert – The SSL certificate to verify.
close()

Disposes of any internal state.

Currently, this just closes the PoolManager, which closes pooled connections.

get_connection(url, proxies=None)

Returns a urllib3 connection for the given URL. This should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter.

Parameters:
  • url – The URL to connect to.
  • proxies – (optional) A Requests-style dictionary of proxies used on this request.
init_poolmanager(connections, maxsize, block=False)

Initializes a urllib3 PoolManager. This method should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter.

Parameters:
  • connections – The number of urllib3 connection pools to cache.
  • maxsize – The maximum number of connections to save in the pool.
  • block – Block when no free connections are available.
proxy_headers(proxy)

Returns a dictionary of the headers to add to any request sent through a proxy. This works with urllib3 magic to ensure that they are correctly sent to the proxy, rather than in a tunnelled request if CONNECT is being used.

This should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter.

Parameters:
  • proxies – The url of the proxy being used for this request.
  • kwargs – Optional additional keyword arguments.
request_url(request, proxies)

Obtain the url to use when making the final request.

If the message is being sent through a proxy, the full URL has to be used. Otherwise, we should only use the path portion of the URL.

This should not be called from user code, and is only exposed for use when subclassing the HTTPAdapter.

Parameters:
  • request – The PreparedRequest being sent.
  • proxies – A dictionary of schemes to proxy URLs.
send(request, stream=False, timeout=None, verify=True, cert=None, proxies=None)

Sends PreparedRequest object. Returns Response object.

Parameters:
  • request – The PreparedRequest being sent.
  • stream – (optional) Whether to stream the request content.
  • timeout – (optional) The timeout on the request.
  • verify – (optional) Whether to verify SSL certificates.
  • vert – (optional) Any user-provided SSL certificate to be trusted.
  • proxies – (optional) The proxies dictionary to apply to the request.

Migrating to 1.x

This section details the main differences between 0.x and 1.x and is meant to ease the pain of upgrading.

API Changes
  • Response.json is now a callable and not a property of a response.

    import requests
    r = requests.get('https://github.com/timeline.json')
    r.json()   # This *call* raises an exception if JSON decoding fails
    
  • The Session API has changed. Sessions objects no longer take parameters. Session is also now capitalized, but it can still be instantiated with a lowercase session for backwards compatibility.

    s = requests.Session()    # formerly, session took parameters
    s.auth = auth
    s.headers.update(headers)
    r = s.get('http://httpbin.org/headers')
    
  • All request hooks have been removed except ‘response’.

  • Authentication helpers have been broken out into separate modules. See requests-oauthlib and requests-kerberos.

  • The parameter for streaming requests was changed from prefetch to stream and the logic was inverted. In addition, stream is now required for raw response reading.

    # in 0.x, passing prefetch=False would accomplish the same thing
    r = requests.get('https://github.com/timeline.json', stream=True)
    for chunk in r.iter_content(8192):
        ...
    
  • The config parameter to the requests method has been removed. Some of these options are now configured on a Session such as keep-alive and maximum number of redirects. The verbosity option should be handled by configuring logging.

    import requests
    import logging
    
    # these two lines enable debugging at httplib level (requests->urllib3->httplib)
    # you will see the REQUEST, including HEADERS and DATA, and RESPONSE with HEADERS but without DATA.
    # the only thing missing will be the response.body which is not logged.
    import httplib
    httplib.HTTPConnection.debuglevel = 1
    
    logging.basicConfig() # you need to initialize logging, otherwise you will not see anything from requests
    logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
    requests_log = logging.getLogger("requests.packages.urllib3")
    requests_log.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
    requests_log.propagate = True
    
    requests.get('http://httpbin.org/headers')
    
Licensing

One key difference that has nothing to do with the API is a change in the license from the ISC license to the Apache 2.0 license. The Apache 2.0 license ensures that contributions to Requests are also covered by the Apache 2.0 license.

Contributor Guide

If you want to contribute to the project, this part of the documentation is for you.

Development Philosophy

Requests is an open but opinionated library, created by an open but opinionated developer.

Benevolent Dictator

Kenneth Reitz is the BDFL. He has final say in any decision related to Requests.

Values

  • Simplicity is always better than functionality.
  • Listen to everyone, then disregard it.
  • The API is all that matters. Everything else is secondary.
  • Fit the 90% use-case. Ignore the nay-sayers.

Semantic Versioning

For many years, the open source community has been plagued with version number dystonia. Numbers vary so greatly from project to project, they are practically meaningless.

Requests uses Semantic Versioning. This specification seeks to put an end to this madness with a small set of practical guidelines for you and your colleagues to use in your next project.

Standard Library?

Requests has no active plans to be included in the standard library. This decision has been discussed at length with Guido as well as numerous core developers.

Essentially, the standard library is where a library goes to die. It is appropriate for a module to be included when active development is no longer necessary.

Requests just reached v1.0.0. This huge milestone marks a major step in the right direction.

Linux Distro Packages

Distributions have been made for many Linux repositories, including: Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, and Arch.

These distributions are sometimes divergent forks, or are otherwise not kept up-to-date with the latest code and bugfixes. PyPI (and its mirrors) and GitHub are the official distribution sources; alternatives are not supported by the Requests project.

How to Help

Requests is under active development, and contributions are more than welcome!

  1. Check for open issues or open a fresh issue to start a discussion around a bug. There is a Contributor Friendly tag for issues that should be ideal for people who are not very familiar with the codebase yet.
  2. Fork the repository on GitHub and start making your changes to a new branch.
  3. Write a test which shows that the bug was fixed.
  4. Send a pull request and bug the maintainer until it gets merged and published. :) Make sure to add yourself to AUTHORS.

Feature Freeze

As of v1.0.0, Requests has now entered a feature freeze. Requests for new features and Pull Requests implementing those features will not be accepted.

Development Dependencies

You’ll need to install py.test in order to run the Requests’ test suite:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ invoke test
py.test
platform darwin -- Python 2.7.3 -- pytest-2.3.4
collected 25 items

test_requests.py .........................
25 passed in 3.50 seconds

Runtime Environments

Requests currently supports the following versions of Python:

  • Python 2.6
  • Python 2.7
  • Python 3.1
  • Python 3.2
  • Python 3.3
  • PyPy 1.9

Support for Python 3.1 and 3.2 may be dropped at any time.

Google App Engine will never be officially supported. Pull Requests for compatibility will be accepted, as long as they don’t complicate the codebase.

Are you crazy?

  • SPDY support would be awesome. No C extensions.

Downstream Repackaging

If you are repackaging Requests, please note that you must also redistribute the cacerts.pem file in order to get correct SSL functionality.

Authors

Requests is written and maintained by Kenneth Reitz and various contributors:

Development Lead

Urllib3

Patches and Suggestions