Quickstart¶

Eager to get started? This page gives a good introduction in how to get started with Requests. This assumes you already have Requests installed. If you do not, head over to the Installation section.

First, make sure that:

Requests is installed
Requests is up-to-date

Lets gets started with some simple use cases and examples.

Make a GET Request¶

Making a standard request with Requests is very simple.

Let’s get GitHub’s public timeline

r = requests.get('https://github.com/timeline.json')

Now, we have a Response object called r. We can get all the information we need from this.

Response Content¶

We can read the content of the server’s response:

>>> r.content
'[{"repository":{"open_issues":0,"url":"https://github.com/...

Requests does its best to decode content from the server. Most unicode charsets, gzip, and deflate encodings are all seamlessly decoded.

Make a POST Request¶

POST requests are equally simple:

r = requests.post("http://httpbin.org/post")

Typically, you want to send some form-encoded data — much like an HTML form. To do this, simply pass a dictionary to the data argument. Your dictionary of data will automatically be form-encoded when the request is made:

>>> payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}
>>> r = requests.post("http://httpbin.org/post", data=payload)
>>> print r.content
{
  "origin": "179.13.100.4",
  "files": {},
  "form": {
    "key2": "value2",
    "key1": "value1"
  },
  "url": "http://httpbin.org/post",
  "args": {},
  "headers": {
    "Content-Length": "23",
    "Accept-Encoding": "identity, deflate, compress, gzip",
    "Accept": "*/*",
    "User-Agent": "python-requests/0.8.0",
    "Host": "127.0.0.1:7077",
    "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
  },
  "data": ""
}

There are many times that you want to send data that is not form-encoded. If you pass in a string instead of a dict, that data will be posted directly.

For example, the GitHub API v3 accepts JSON-Encoded POST/PATCH data:

url = 'https://api.github.com/some/endpoint'
payload = {'some': 'data'}

r = requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(payload))

Custom Headers¶

If you’d like to add HTTP headers to a request, simply pass in a dict to the headers parameter.

For example, we didn’t specify our content-type in the previous example:

url = 'https://api.github.com/some/endpoint'
payload = {'some': 'data'}
headers = {'content-type': 'application/json'}

r = requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(payload), headers=headers)

POST a Multipart-Encoded File¶

Requests makes it simple to upload Multipart-encoded files:

>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/post'
>>> files = {'report.xls': open('report.xls', 'rb')}

>>> r = requests.post(url, files=files)
>>> r.content
{
  "origin": "179.13.100.4",
  "files": {
    "hmm": "<censored...binary...data>"
  },
  "form": {},
  "url": "http://httpbin.org/post",
  "args": {},
  "headers": {
    "Content-Length": "3196",
    "Accept-Encoding": "identity, deflate, compress, gzip",
    "Accept": "*/*",
    "User-Agent": "python-requests/0.8.0",
    "Host": "httpbin.org:80",
    "Content-Type": "multipart/form-data; boundary=127.0.0.1.502.21746.1321131593.786.1"
  },
  "data": ""
}

Response Status Codes¶

We can check the response status code:

>>> r.status_code
200

Requests also comes with a built-in status code lookup object for easy reference:

>>> r.status_code == requests.codes.ok
True

If we made a bad request (non-200 response), we can raise it with Response.raise_for_status():

>>> _r = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/status/404')
>>> _r.status_code
404

>>> _r.raise_for_status()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "requests/models.py", line 394, in raise_for_status
    raise self.error
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 404: NOT FOUND

But, since our status_code was 200, when we call it:

>>> r.raise_for_status()
None

All is well.

Response Headers¶

We can view the server’s response headers with a simple Python dictionary interface:

>>> r.headers
{
    'status': '200 OK',
    'content-encoding': 'gzip',
    'transfer-encoding': 'chunked',
    'connection': 'close',
    'server': 'nginx/1.0.4',
    'x-runtime': '148ms',
    'etag': '"e1ca502697e5c9317743dc078f67693f"',
    'content-type': 'application/json; charset=utf-8'
}

The dictionary is special, though: it’s made just for HTTP headers. According to RFC 2616, HTTP Headers are case-insensitive.

So, we can access the headers using any capitalization we want:

>>> r.headers['Content-Type']
'application/json; charset=utf-8'

>>> r.headers.get('content-type')
'application/json; charset=utf-8'

If a header doesn’t exist in the Response, its value defaults to None:

>>> r.headers['X-Random']
None

Cookies¶

If a response contains some Cookies, you can get quick access to them:

>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/cookies/set/requests-is/awesome'
>>> r = requests.get(url)

>>> print r.cookies
{'requests-is': 'awesome'}

To send your own cookies to the server, you can use the cookies parameter:

>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/cookies'
>>> cookies = dict(cookies_are='working')

>>> r = requests.get(url, cookies=cookies)
>>> r.content
'{"cookies": {"cookies_are": "working"}}'

Basic Authentication¶

Most web services require authentication. There many different types of authentication, but the most common is HTTP Basic Auth.

Making requests with Basic Auth is extremely simple:

>>> requests.get('https://api.github.com/user', auth=('user', 'pass'))
<Response [200]>

Digest Authentication¶

Another popular form of web service protection is Digest Authentication:

>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/digest-auth/auth/user/pass'
>>> requests.get(url, auth=('digest', 'user', 'pass'))
<Response [200]>

Redirection and History¶

Requests will automatically perform location redirection while using impodotent methods.

GitHub redirects all HTTP requests to HTTPS. Let’s see what happens:

>>> r = request.get('http://github.com')
>>> r.url
'https://github.com/'
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.history
[<Response [301]>]

The Response.history list contains a list of the Request objects that were created in order to complete the request.

If you’re using GET, HEAD, or OPTIONS, you can disable redirection handling with the disable_redirects parameter:

>>> r = request.get('http://github.com')
>>> r.status_code
301
>>> r.history
[]

If you’re using POST, PUT, PATCH, &c, you can also explicitly enable redirection as well:

>>> r = request.post('http://github.com')
>>> r.url
'https://github.com/'
>>> r.history
[<Response [301]>]

Timeouts¶

You can tell requests to stop waiting for a response after a given number of seconds with the timeout parameter:

>>> requests.get('http://github.com', timeout=0.001)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
requests.exceptions.Timeout: Request timed out.

Note

timeout only effects the connection process itself, not the downloading of the respone body.

Note

Errors and Exceptions¶

In the event of a network problem (e.g. DNS failure, refused connection, etc), Requests will raise a ConnectionError exception.

In the event of the rare invalid HTTP response, Requests will raise an HTTPError exception.

If a request times out, a Timeout exception is raised.

If a request exceeds the configured number of maximum redirections, a TooManyRedirects exception is raised.

All exceptions that Requests explicitly raises inherit from requests.exceptions.RequestException.

Ready for more? Check out the advanced section.