Requests: HTTP for Humans
Requests is an ISC Licensed HTTP library, written in Python, for human beings.
Most existing Python modules for sending HTTP requests are extremely verbose and cumbersome. Python's builtin urllib2 module provides most of the HTTP capabilities you should need, but the api is thoroughly broken. 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', auth=('user', 'pass'))
>>> r.status_code
204
>>> r.headers['content-type']
'application/json'
>>> r.content
...
See the same code, without Requests.
Requests allow you to send HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE HTTP requests. You can add headers, form data, multipart files, and parameters with simple Python dictionaries, and access the response data in the same way. It's powered by urllib2, but it does all the hard work and crazy hacks for you.
Features
- Extremely simple HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE Requests.
- Gevent support for Asyncronous Requests.
- Sessions with cookie persistience.
- Basic, Digest, and Custom Authentication support.
- Automatic form-encoding of dictionaries
- A simple dictionary interface for request/response cookies.
- Multipart file uploads.
- Automatc decoding of Unicode, gzip, and deflate responses.
- Full support for unicode URLs and domain names.
Usage
It couldn't be simpler.
>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get('http://google.com')
HTTPS? Basic Authentication?
>>> r = requests.get('https://httpbin.ep.io/basic-auth/user/pass')
>>> r.status_code
401
Uh oh, we're not authorized! Let's add authentication.
>>> r = requests.get('https://httpbin.ep.io/basic-auth/user/pass', auth=('user', 'pass'))
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.headers['content-type']
'application/json'
>>> r.content
'{"authenticated": true, "user": "user"}'
Installation
To install requests, simply:
$ pip install requests
Or, if you absolutely must:
$ easy_install requests
But, you really shouldn't do that.
Contribute
If you'd like to contribute, simply fork the repository, commit your changes to the develop branch (or branch off of it), and send a pull request. Make sure you add yourself to AUTHORS.