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