Requests: HTTP for Humans¶
Release v0.8.2. (Installation)
Requests is an ISC 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. 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 takes all of the work out of Python HTTP — making your integration with web services seamless. There’s no need to manually add query strings to your URLs, or to form-encode your POST data.
Testimonials¶
The Washington Post, Twitter, Inc, Readability, and Federal US Institutions use Requests internally. It has been installed over 45,000 times from PyPi.
- Armin Ronacher
- Requests is the perfect example how beautiful an API can be with the right level of abstraction.
- Matt DeBoard
- I’m going to get @kennethreitz’s Python requests module tattooed on my body, somehow. The whole thing.
- Daniel Greenfeld
- Nuked a 1200 LOC spaghetti code library with 10 lines of code thanks to @kennethreitz’s request library. Today has been AWESOME.
- Kenny Meyers
- Python HTTP: When in doubt, or when not in doubt, use Requests. Beautiful, simple, Pythonic.
Feature Support¶
Requests is ready for today’s web.
- International Domains and URLs
- Keep-Alive & Connection Pooling
- Sessions with Cookie Persistence
- Basic/Digest Authentication
- Elegant Key/Value Cookies
- Automatic Decompression
- Unicode Response Bodies
- Multipart File Uploads
- Connection Timeouts
- Zero Dependencies
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.
Community Guide¶
This part of the documentation, which is mostly prose, details the Requests ecosystem and community.
API Documentation¶
If you are looking for information on a specific function, class or method, this part of the documentation is for you.
Developer Guide¶
If you want to contribute to the project, this part of the documentation is for you.
Requests is an elegant and simple HTTP library for Python, built for human beings. You are currently looking at the documentation of the development release.
Feedback
Feedback is greatly appreciated. If you have any questions, comments, random praise, or anonymous threats, shoot me an email.
