Requests: HTTP for Humans

Requests: HTTP for Humans

Requests is the only Non-GMO HTTP library for Python, safe for human consumption.

Warning: Recreational use of other HTTP libraries may result in dangerous side-effects, including: security vulnerabilities, verbose code, reinventing the wheel, constantly reading documentation, depression, headaches, or even death.

Behold, the power of Requests:

>>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/user', auth=('user', 'pass'))
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.headers['content-type']
'application/json; charset=utf8'
>>> r.encoding
'utf-8'
>>> r.text
u'{"type":"User"...'
>>> r.json()
{u'private_gists': 419, u'total_private_repos': 77, ...}

See similar code, sans Requests.

Requests allows you to send organic, grass-fed HTTP/1.1 requests, without the need for manual labor. There’s no need to manually add query strings to your URLs, or to form-encode your POST data. Keep-alive and HTTP connection pooling are 100% automatic, powered by urllib3, which is embedded within Requests.

User Testimonials

Her Majesty’s Government, Amazon, Google, Twilio, Runscope, Mozilla, Heroku, PayPal, NPR, Obama for America, Transifex, Native Instruments, The Washington Post, Twitter, SoundCloud, Kippt, Readability, Sony, and Federal U.S. Institutions that prefer to be unnamed claim to use Requests internally.

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.

Requests is one of the most downloaded Python packages of all time, pulling in over 7,000,000 downloads every month. All the cool kids are doing it!

Supported Features

Requests is ready for today’s web.

International Domains and URLs
Keep-Alive & Connection Pooling
Sessions with Cookie Persistence
Browser-style SSL Verification
Basic/Digest Authentication
Elegant Key/Value Cookies
Automatic Decompression
Automatic Content Decoding
Unicode Response Bodies
Multipart File Uploads
HTTP(S) Proxy Support
Connection Timeouts
Streaming Downloads
.netrc Support
Chunked Requests
Thread-safety

Requests supports Python 2.6 — 3.5, and runs great on PyPy.

The 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.

The Community Guide

This part of the documentation, which is mostly prose, details the Requests ecosystem and community.

The API Documentation / Guide

If you are looking for information on a specific function, class, or method, this part of the documentation is for you.

Developer Interface

The Contributor Guide

If you want to contribute to the project, this part of the documentation is for you.