Authentication¶

Basic Authentication¶

Many web services that require authentication accept HTTP Basic Auth. This is the simplest kind, and Requests supports it straight out of the box.

Making requests with HTTP Basic Auth is very simple:

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

In fact, HTTP Basic Auth is so common that Requests provides a handy shorthand for using it:

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

Providing the credentials in a tuple like this is exactly the same as the HTTPBasicAuth example above.

Digest Authentication¶

Another very popular form of HTTP Authentication is Digest Authentication, and Requests supports this out of the box as well:

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

Other Authentication¶

Requests is designed to allow other forms of authentication to be easily and quickly plugged in. Members of the open-source community frequently write authentication handlers for more complicated or less commonly-used forms of authentication. Some of the best have been brought together under the Requests organization, including:

• OAuth

• Kerberos

• NTLM

If you want to use any of these forms of authentication, go straight to their Github page and follow the instructions.

New Forms of Authentication¶

If you can’t find a good implementation of the form of authentication you want, you can implement it yourself. Requests makes it easy to add your own forms of authentication.

To do so, subclass requests.auth.AuthBase and implement the __call__() method. When an authentication handler is attached to a request, it is called during request setup. The __call__ method must therefore do whatever is required to make the authentication work. Some forms of authentication will additionally add hooks to provide further functionality.

Examples can be found under the Requests organization and in the auth.py file.