Contribution Guidelines

Before opening any issues or proposing any pull requests, please do the following:

  1. Read our Contributor's Guide.
  2. Understand our development philosophy.

To get the greatest chance of helpful responses, please also observe the following additional notes.

Questions

The GitHub issue tracker is for bug reports and feature requests. Please do not use it to ask questions about how to use Requests. These questions should instead be directed to Stack Overflow. Make sure that your question is tagged with the python-requests tag when asking it on Stack Overflow, to ensure that it is answered promptly and accurately.

Good Bug Reports

Please be aware of the following things when filing bug reports:

  1. Avoid raising duplicate issues. Please use the GitHub issue search feature to check whether your bug report or feature request has been mentioned in the past. Duplicate bug reports and feature requests are a huge maintenance burden on the limited resources of the project. If it is clear from your report that you would have struggled to find the original, that's ok, but if searching for a selection of words in your issue title would have found the duplicate then the issue will likely be closed extremely abruptly.

  2. When filing bug reports about exceptions or tracebacks, please include the complete traceback. Partial tracebacks, or just the exception text, are not helpful. Issues that do not contain complete tracebacks may be closed without warning.

  3. Make sure you provide a suitable amount of information to work with. This means you should provide:

    • Guidance on how to reproduce the issue. Ideally, this should be a small code sample that can be run immediately by the maintainers. Failing that, let us know what you‘re doing, how often it happens, what environment you’re using, etc. Be thorough: it prevents us needing to ask further questions.
    • Tell us what you expected to happen. When we run your example code, what are we expecting to happen? What does “success” look like for your code?
    • Tell us what actually happens. It‘s not helpful for you to say "it doesn’t work" or “it fails”. Tell us how it fails: do you get an exception? A hang? A non-200 status code? How was the actual result different from your expected result?
    • Tell us what version of Requests you're using, and how you installed it. Different versions of Requests behave differently and have different bugs, and some distributors of Requests ship patches on top of the code we supply.

    If you do not provide all of these things, it will take us much longer to fix your problem. If we ask you to clarify these and you never respond, we will close your issue without fixing it.