Requests: HTTP for Humans

Release v. (Installation)

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.

Testimonials

Twitter, Inc, a U.S. Federal Institution, NIH, Readability, and Work for Pie use Requests internally.

Armin Ronacher

Requests is the perfect example how beautiful an API can be with the right level of abstraction.

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.

Rich Leland

Requests is awesome. That is all.

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.