Python-Requests

March 12, 2022
0

Python Requests

Release v2. 26. 0. (Installation)
Requests is an elegant and simple HTTP library for Python, built for human beings.
Behold, the power of Requests:
>>> r = (”, auth=(‘user’, ‘pass’))
>>> atus_code
200
>>> r. headers[‘content-type’]
‘application/json; charset=utf8’
>>> r. encoding
‘utf-8’
>>>
‘{“type”:”User”… ‘
>>> ()
{‘private_gists’: 419, ‘total_private_repos’: 77,… }
See similar code, sans Requests.
Requests allows you to send HTTP/1. 1 requests extremely easily.
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, thanks to urllib3.
Beloved Features¶
Requests is ready for today’s web.
Keep-Alive & Connection Pooling
International Domains and URLs
Sessions with Cookie Persistence
Browser-style SSL Verification
Automatic Content Decoding
Basic/Digest Authentication
Elegant Key/Value Cookies
Automatic Decompression
Unicode Response Bodies
HTTP(S) Proxy Support
Multipart File Uploads
Streaming Downloads
Connection Timeouts
Chunked Requests
Support
Requests officially supports Python 2. 7 & 3. 6+, and runs great on PyPy.
The 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.
Installation of Requests
$ python -m pip install requests
Get the Source Code
Quickstart
Make a Request
Passing Parameters In URLs
Response Content
Binary Response Content
JSON Response Content
Raw Response Content
Custom Headers
More complicated POST requests
POST a Multipart-Encoded File
Response Status Codes
Response Headers
Cookies
Redirection and History
Timeouts
Errors and Exceptions
Advanced Usage
Session Objects
Request and Response Objects
Prepared Requests
SSL Cert Verification
Client Side Certificates
CA Certificates
Body Content Workflow
Keep-Alive
Streaming Uploads
Chunk-Encoded Requests
POST Multiple Multipart-Encoded Files
Event Hooks
Custom Authentication
Streaming Requests
Proxies
Compliance
HTTP Verbs
Custom Verbs
Link Headers
Transport Adapters
Blocking Or Non-Blocking?
Header Ordering
Authentication
Basic Authentication
Digest Authentication
OAuth 1 Authentication
OAuth 2 and OpenID Connect Authentication
Other Authentication
New Forms of Authentication
The API Documentation / Guide¶
If you are looking for information on a specific function, class, or method,
this part of the documentation is for you.
Developer Interface
Main Interface
Exceptions
Request Sessions
Lower-Level Classes
Lower-Lower-Level Classes
Encodings
Status Code Lookup
Migrating to 1. x
Migrating to 2. x
The Contributor Guide¶
If you want to contribute to the project, this part of the documentation is for
you.
Contributor’s Guide
Be Cordial
Get Early Feedback
Contribution Suitability
Code Contributions
Steps for Submitting Code
Code Review
New Contributors
Kenneth Reitz’s Code Style™
Documentation Contributions
Bug Reports
Feature Requests
Authors
Keepers of the Crystals
Previous Keepers of Crystals
Patches and Suggestions
There are no more guides. You are now guideless.
Good luck.

Python Requests

Python’s Requests Library (Guide)

Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Making HTTP Requests With Python
The requests library is the de facto standard for making HTTP requests in Python. It abstracts the complexities of making requests behind a beautiful, simple API so that you can focus on interacting with services and consuming data in your application.
Throughout this article, you’ll see some of the most useful features that requests has to offer as well as how to customize and optimize those features for different situations you may come across. You’ll also learn how to use requests in an efficient way as well as how to prevent requests to external services from slowing down your application.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to:
Make requests using the most common HTTP methods
Customize your requests’ headers and data, using the query string and message body
Inspect data from your requests and responses
Make authenticated requests
Configure your requests to help prevent your application from backing up or slowing down
Though I’ve tried to include as much information as you need to understand the features and examples included in this article, I do assume a very basic general knowledge of HTTP. That said, you still may be able to follow along fine anyway.
Now that that is out of the way, let’s dive in and see how you can use requests in your application!
Getting Started With requests
Let’s begin by installing the requests library. To do so, run the following command:
If you prefer to use Pipenv for managing Python packages, you can run the following:
$ pipenv install requests
Once requests is installed, you can use it in your application. Importing requests looks like this:
Now that you’re all set up, it’s time to begin your journey through requests. Your first goal will be learning how to make a GET request.
The GET Request
HTTP methods such as GET and POST, determine which action you’re trying to perform when making an HTTP request. Besides GET and POST, there are several other common methods that you’ll use later in this tutorial.
One of the most common HTTP methods is GET. The GET method indicates that you’re trying to get or retrieve data from a specified resource. To make a GET request, invoke ().
To test this out, you can make a GET request to GitHub’s Root REST API by calling get() with the following URL:
>>>>>> (”)

Congratulations! You’ve made your first request. Let’s dive a little deeper into the response of that request.
The Response
A Response is a powerful object for inspecting the results of the request. Let’s make that same request again, but this time store the return value in a variable so that you can get a closer look at its attributes and behaviors:
>>>>>> response = (”)
In this example, you’ve captured the return value of get(), which is an instance of Response, and stored it in a variable called response. You can now use response to see a lot of information about the results of your GET request.
Status Codes
The first bit of information that you can gather from Response is the status code. A status code informs you of the status of the request.
For example, a 200 OK status means that your request was successful, whereas a 404 NOT FOUND status means that the resource you were looking for was not found. There are many other possible status codes as well to give you specific insights into what happened with your request.
By accessing. status_code, you can see the status code that the server returned:
>>>>>> atus_code
200. status_code returned a 200, which means your request was successful and the server responded with the data you were requesting.
Sometimes, you might want to use this information to make decisions in your code:
if atus_code == 200:
print(‘Success! ‘)
elif atus_code == 404:
print(‘Not Found. ‘)
With this logic, if the server returns a 200 status code, your program will print Success!. If the result is a 404, your program will print Not Found.
requests goes one step further in simplifying this process for you. If you use a Response instance in a conditional expression, it will evaluate to True if the status code was between 200 and 400, and False otherwise.
Therefore, you can simplify the last example by rewriting the if statement:
if response:
else:
print(‘An error has occurred. ‘)
Keep in mind that this method is not verifying that the status code is equal to 200. The reason for this is that other status codes within the 200 to 400 range, such as 204 NO CONTENT and 304 NOT MODIFIED, are also considered successful in the sense that they provide some workable response.
For example, the 204 tells you that the response was successful, but there’s no content to return in the message body.
So, make sure you use this convenient shorthand only if you want to know if the request was generally successful and then, if necessary, handle the response appropriately based on the status code.
Let’s say you don’t want to check the response’s status code in an if statement. Instead, you want to raise an exception if the request was unsuccessful. You can do this using. raise_for_status():
import requests
from requests. exceptions import HTTPError
for url in [”, ”]:
try:
response = (url)
# If the response was successful, no Exception will be raised
response. raise_for_status()
except HTTPError as _err:
print(f’HTTP error occurred: {_err}’) # Python 3. 6
except Exception as err:
print(f’Other error occurred: {err}’) # Python 3. 6
If you invoke. raise_for_status(), an HTTPError will be raised for certain status codes. If the status code indicates a successful request, the program will proceed without that exception being raised.
Now, you know a lot about how to deal with the status code of the response you got back from the server. However, when you make a GET request, you rarely only care about the status code of the response. Usually, you want to see more. Next, you’ll see how to view the actual data that the server sent back in the body of the response.
Content
The response of a GET request often has some valuable information, known as a payload, in the message body. Using the attributes and methods of Response, you can view the payload in a variety of different formats.
To see the response’s content in bytes, you use. content:
>>> ntent
b'{“current_user_url”:”, “current_user_authorizations_html_url”:”/client_id}”, “authorizations_url”:”, “code_search_url”:”query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}”, “commit_search_url”:”query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}”, “emails_url”:”, “emojis_url”:”, “events_url”:”, “feeds_url”:”, “followers_url”:”, “following_url”:”/target}”, “gists_url”:”/gist_id}”, “hub_url”:”, “issue_search_url”:”query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}”, “issues_url”:”, “keys_url”:”, “notifications_url”:”, “organization_repositories_url”:”org}/repos{? type, page, per_page, sort}”, “organization_url”:”org}”, “public_gists_url”:”, “rate_limit_url”:”, “repository_url”:”owner}/{repo}”, “repository_search_url”:”query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}”, “current_user_repositories_url”:”? type, page, per_page, sort}”, “starred_url”:”/owner}{/repo}”, “starred_gists_url”:”, “team_url”:”, “user_url”:”user}”, “user_organizations_url”:”, “user_repositories_url”:”user}/repos{? type, page, per_page, sort}”, “user_search_url”:”query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}”}’
While. content gives you access to the raw bytes of the response payload, you will often want to convert them into a string using a character encoding such as UTF-8. response will do that for you when you access
>>>>>>
‘{“current_user_url”:”, “current_user_authorizations_html_url”:”/client_id}”, “authorizations_url”:”, “code_search_url”:”query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}”, “commit_search_url”:”query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}”, “emails_url”:”, “emojis_url”:”, “events_url”:”, “feeds_url”:”, “followers_url”:”, “following_url”:”/target}”, “gists_url”:”/gist_id}”, “hub_url”:”, “issue_search_url”:”query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}”, “issues_url”:”, “keys_url”:”, “notifications_url”:”, “organization_repositories_url”:”org}/repos{? type, page, per_page, sort}”, “organization_url”:”org}”, “public_gists_url”:”, “rate_limit_url”:”, “repository_url”:”owner}/{repo}”, “repository_search_url”:”query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}”, “current_user_repositories_url”:”? type, page, per_page, sort}”, “starred_url”:”/owner}{/repo}”, “starred_gists_url”:”, “team_url”:”, “user_url”:”user}”, “user_organizations_url”:”, “user_repositories_url”:”user}/repos{? type, page, per_page, sort}”, “user_search_url”:”query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}”}’
Because the decoding of bytes to a str requires an encoding scheme, requests will try to guess the encoding based on the response’s headers if you do not specify one. You can provide an explicit encoding by setting. encoding before accessing
>>>>>> response. encoding = ‘utf-8’ # Optional: requests infers this internally
>>>
If you take a look at the response, you’ll see that it is actually serialized JSON content. To get a dictionary, you could take the str you retrieved from and deserialize it using (). However, a simpler way to accomplish this task is to use ():
>>>>>> ()
{‘current_user_url’: ”, ‘current_user_authorizations_html_url’: ‘/client_id}’, ‘authorizations_url’: ”, ‘code_search_url’: ‘query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}’, ‘commit_search_url’: ‘query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}’, ’emails_url’: ”, ’emojis_url’: ”, ‘events_url’: ”, ‘feeds_url’: ”, ‘followers_url’: ”, ‘following_url’: ‘/target}’, ‘gists_url’: ‘/gist_id}’, ‘hub_url’: ”, ‘issue_search_url’: ‘query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}’, ‘issues_url’: ”, ‘keys_url’: ”, ‘notifications_url’: ”, ‘organization_repositories_url’: ‘org}/repos{? type, page, per_page, sort}’, ‘organization_url’: ‘org}’, ‘public_gists_url’: ”, ‘rate_limit_url’: ”, ‘repository_url’: ‘owner}/{repo}’, ‘repository_search_url’: ‘query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}’, ‘current_user_repositories_url’: ‘? type, page, per_page, sort}’, ‘starred_url’: ‘/owner}{/repo}’, ‘starred_gists_url’: ”, ‘team_url’: ”, ‘user_url’: ‘user}’, ‘user_organizations_url’: ”, ‘user_repositories_url’: ‘user}/repos{? type, page, per_page, sort}’, ‘user_search_url’: ‘query}{&page, per_page, sort, order}’}
The type of the return value of () is a dictionary, so you can access values in the object by key.
You can do a lot with status codes and message bodies. But, if you need more information, like metadata about the response itself, you’ll need to look at the response’s headers.
Query String Parameters
One common way to customize a GET request is to pass values through query string parameters in the URL. To do this using get(), you pass data to params. For example, you can use GitHub’s Search API to look for the requests library:
# Search GitHub’s repositories for requests
response = (
”,
params={‘q’: ‘requests+language:python’}, )
# Inspect some attributes of the `requests` repository
json_response = ()
repository = json_response[‘items’][0]
print(f’Repository name: {repository[“name”]}’) # Python 3. 6+
print(f’Repository description: {repository[“description”]}’) # Python 3. 6+
By passing the dictionary {‘q’: ‘requests+language:python’} to the params parameter of (), you are able to modify the results that come back from the Search API.
You can pass params to get() in the form of a dictionary, as you have just done, or as a list of tuples:
>>>>>> (… ”,… params=[(‘q’, ‘requests+language:python’)],… )
You can even pass the values as bytes:
>>>>>> (… params=b’q=requests+language:python’,… )
Query strings are useful for parameterizing GET requests. You can also customize your requests by adding or modifying the headers you send.
Other HTTP Methods
Aside from GET, other popular HTTP methods include POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, PATCH, and OPTIONS. requests provides a method, with a similar signature to get(), for each of these HTTP methods:
>>>>>> (”, data={‘key’:’value’})
>>> (”, data={‘key’:’value’})
>>> (”)
>>> requests. options(”)
Each function call makes a request to the bin service using the corresponding HTTP method. For each method, you can inspect their responses in the same way you did before:
>>> response. headers[‘Content-Type’]
‘application/json’
>>> response = (”)
>>> json_response = ()
>>> json_response[‘args’]
{}
Headers, response bodies, status codes, and more are returned in the Response for each method. Next you’ll take a closer look at the POST, PUT, and PATCH methods and learn how they differ from the other request types.
The Message Body
According to the HTTP specification, POST, PUT, and the less common PATCH requests pass their data through the message body rather than through parameters in the query string. Using requests, you’ll pass the payload to the corresponding function’s data parameter.
data takes a dictionary, a list of tuples, bytes, or a file-like object. You’ll want to adapt the data you send in the body of your request to the specific needs of the service you’re interacting with.
For example, if your request’s content type is application/x-www-form-urlencoded, you can send the form data as a dictionary:
You can also send that same data as a list of tuples:
>>>>>> (”, data=[(‘key’, ‘value’)])
If, however, you need to send JSON data, you can use the json parameter. When you pass JSON data via json, requests will serialize your data and add the correct Content-Type header for you.
is a great resource created by the author of requests, Kenneth Reitz. It’s a service that accepts test requests and responds with data about the requests. For instance, you can use it to inspect a basic POST request:
>>>>>> response = (”, json={‘key’:’value’})
>>> json_response[‘data’]
‘{“key”: “value”}’
>>> json_response[‘headers’][‘Content-Type’]
You can see from the response that the server received your request data and headers as you sent them. requests also provides this information to you in the form of a PreparedRequest.
Inspecting Your Request
When you make a request, the requests library prepares the request before actually sending it to the destination server. Request preparation includes things like validating headers and serializing JSON content.
You can view the PreparedRequest by accessing. request:
>>> quest. headers[‘Content-Type’]
”
b'{“key”: “value”}’
Inspecting the PreparedRequest gives you access to all kinds of information about the request being made such as payload, URL, headers, authentication, and more.
So far, you’ve made a lot of different kinds of requests, but they’ve all had one thing in common: they’re unauthenticated requests to public APIs. Many services you may come across will want you to authenticate in some way.
Authentication
Authentication helps a service understand who you are. Typically, you provide your credentials to a server by passing data through the Authorization header or a custom header defined by the service. All the request functions you’ve seen to this point provide a parameter called auth, which allows you to pass your credentials.
One example of an API that requires authentication is GitHub’s Authenticated User API. This endpoint provides information about the authenticated user’s profile. To make a request to the Authenticated User API, you can pass your GitHub username and password in a tuple to get():
>>>>>> from getpass import getpass
>>> (”, auth=(‘username’, getpass()))
The request succeeded if the credentials you passed in the tuple to auth are valid. If you try to make this request with no credentials, you’ll see that the status code is 401 Unauthorized:

When you pass your username and password in a tuple to the auth parameter, requests is applying the credentials using HTTP’s Basic access authentication scheme under the hood.
Therefore, you could make the same request by passing explicit Basic authentication credentials using HTTPBasicAuth:
>>>>>> from import HTTPBasicAuth
>>> from getpass import getpass
>>> (… auth=HTTPBasicAuth(‘username’, getpass())… )
Though you don’t need to be explicit for Basic authentication, you may want to authenticate using another method. requests provides other methods of authentication out of the box such as HTTPDigestAuth and HTTPProxyAuth.
You can even supply your own authentication mechanism. To do so, you must first create a subclass of AuthBase. Then, you implement __call__():
from import AuthBase
class TokenAuth(AuthBase):
“””Implements a custom authentication scheme. “””
def __init__(self, token):
= token
def __call__(self, r):
“””Attach an API token to a custom auth header. “””
r. headers[‘X-TokenAuth’] = f'{}’ # Python 3. 6+
return r
(”, auth=TokenAuth(‘12345abcde-token’))
Here, your custom TokenAuth mechanism receives a token, then includes that token in the X-TokenAuth header of your request.
Bad authentication mechanisms can lead to security vulnerabilities, so unless a service requires a custom authentication mechanism for some reason, you’ll always want to use a tried-and-true auth scheme like Basic or OAuth.
While you’re thinking about security, let’s consider dealing with SSL Certificates using requests.
SSL Certificate Verification
Any time the data you are trying to send or receive is sensitive, security is important. The way that you communicate with secure sites over HTTP is by establishing an encrypted connection using SSL, which means that verifying the target server’s SSL Certificate is critical.
The good news is that requests does this for you by default. However, there are some cases where you might want to change this behavior.
If you want to disable SSL Certificate verification, you pass False to the verify parameter of the request function:
>>>>>> (”, verify=False)
InsecureRequestWarning: Unverified HTTPS request is being made. Adding certificate verification is strongly advised. See: InsecureRequestWarning)
requests even warns you when you’re making an insecure request to help you keep your data safe!
Performance
When using requests, especially in a production application environment, it’s important to consider performance implications. Features like timeout control, sessions, and retry limits can help you keep your application running smoothly.
Timeouts
When you make an inline request to an external service, your system will need to wait upon the response before moving on. If your application waits too long for that response, requests to your service could back up, your user experience could suffer, or your background jobs could hang.
By default, requests will wait indefinitely on the response, so you should almost always specify a timeout duration to prevent these things from happening. To set the request’s timeout, use the timeout parameter. timeout can be an integer or float representing the number of seconds to wait on a response before timing out:
>>>>>> (”, timeout=1)
>>> (”, timeout=3. 05)
In the first request, the request will timeout after 1 second. In the second request, the request will timeout after 3. 05 seconds.
You can also pass a tuple to timeout with the first element being a connect timeout (the time it allows for the client to establish a connection to the server), and the second being a read timeout (the time it will wait on a response once your client has established a connection):
>>>>>> (”, timeout=(2, 5))
If the request establishes a connection within 2 seconds and receives data within 5 seconds of the connection being established, then the response will be returned as it was before. If the request times out, then the function will raise a Timeout exception:
from requests. exceptions import Timeout
response = (”, timeout=1)
except Timeout:
print(‘The request timed out’)
print(‘The request did not time out’)
Your program can catch the Timeout exception and respond accordingly.
The Session Object
Until now, you’ve been dealing with high level requests APIs such as get() and post(). These functions are abstractions of what’s going on when you make your requests. They hide implementation details such as how connections are managed so that you don’t have to worry about them.
Underneath those abstractions is a class called Session. If you need to fine-tune your control over how requests are being made or improve the performance of your requests, you may need to use a Session instance directly.
Sessions are used to persist parameters across requests. For example, if you want to use the same authentication across multiple requests, you could use a session:
from getpass import getpass
# By using a context manager, you can ensure the resources used by
# the session will be released after use
with ssion() as session:
= (‘username’, getpass())
# Instead of (), you’ll use ()
response = (”)
# You can inspect the response just like you did before
print(response. headers)
print(())
Each time you make a request with session, once it has been initialized with authentication credentials, the credentials will be persisted.
The primary performance optimization of sessions comes in the form of persistent connections. When your app makes a connection to a server using a Session, it keeps that connection around in a connection pool. When your app wants to connect to the same server again, it will reuse a connection from the pool rather than establishing a new one.
Max Retries
When a request fails, you may want your application to retry the same request. However, requests will not do this for you by default. To apply this functionality, you need to implement a custom Transport Adapter.
Transport Adapters let you define a set of configurations per service you’re interacting with. For example, let’s say you want all requests to to retry three times before finally raising a ConnectionError. You would build a Transport Adapter, set its max_retries parameter, and mount it to an existing Session:
from apters import HTTPAdapter
from requests. exceptions import ConnectionError
github_adapter = HTTPAdapter(max_retries=3)
session = ssion()
# Use `github_adapter` for all requests to endpoints that start with this URL
(”, github_adapter)
(”)
except ConnectionError as ce:
print(ce)
When you mount the HTTPAdapter, github_adapter, to session, session will adhere to its configuration for each request to Timeouts, Transport Adapters, and sessions are for keeping your code efficient and your application resilient.
Conclusion
You’ve come a long way in learning about Python’s powerful requests library.
You’re now able to:
Make requests using a variety of different HTTP methods such as GET, POST, and PUT
Customize your requests by modifying headers, authentication, query strings, and message bodies
Inspect the data you send to the server and the data the server sends back to you
Work with SSL Certificate verification
Use requests effectively using max_retries, timeout, Sessions, and Transport Adapters
Because you learned how to use requests, you’re equipped to explore the wide world of web services and build awesome applications using the fascinating data they provide.
Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Making HTTP Requests With Python

Frequently Asked Questions about python-requests

What are Python requests?

What is the Requests Resource? … Requests will allow you to send HTTP/1.1 requests using Python. With it, you can add content like headers, form data, multipart files, and parameters via simple Python libraries. It also allows you to access the response data of Python in the same way.Aug 28, 2020

Does Python 3 have requests?

Requests is a favorite library in the Python community because it is concise and easy to use. Requests is powered by urllib3 and jokingly claims to be the “The only Non-GMO HTTP library for Python, safe for human consumption.”Dec 6, 2016

How do you make a request in Python?

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.

Python-Requests

Python Requests

Python Requests

Python’s Requests Library (Guide)

Frequently Asked Questions about python-requests

What are Python requests?

Does Python 3 have requests?

How do you make a request in Python?

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