Requests

Requests is a simple, yet elegant, HTTP library.

>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get('https://httpbin.org/basic-auth/user/pass', auth=('user', 'pass'))
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.headers['content-type']
'application/json; charset=utf8'
>>> r.encoding
'utf-8'
>>> r.text
'{"authenticated": true, ...'
>>> r.json()
{'authenticated': True, ...}

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 PUT & POST data — but nowadays, just use the json method!

Requests is one of the most downloaded Python packages today, pulling in around 300M downloads / week — according to GitHub, Requests is currently depended upon by 4,000,000+ repositories.

Installing Requests and Supported Versions

Requests is available on PyPI:

$ python -m pip install requests

Requests officially supports Python 3.10+.

Supported Features & Best–Practices

Requests is ready for the demands of building robust and reliable HTTP–speaking applications, for the needs of today.

• Keep-Alive & Connection Pooling
• International Domains and URLs
• Sessions with Cookie Persistence
• Browser-style TLS/SSL Verification
• Basic & Digest Authentication
• Familiar dict–like Cookies
• Automatic Content Decompression and Decoding
• Multi-part File Uploads
• SOCKS Proxy Support
• Connection Timeouts
• Streaming Downloads
• Automatic honoring of .netrc
• Chunked HTTP Requests

Cloning the repository

When cloning the Requests repository, you may need to add the -c fetch.fsck.badTimezone=ignore flag to avoid an error about a bad commit timestamp (see this issue for more background):

git clone -c fetch.fsck.badTimezone=ignore https://github.com/psf/requests.git

You can also apply this setting to your global Git config:

git config --global fetch.fsck.badTimezone ignore