Transport Adapters

As of v1.0.0, Requests has moved to a modular internal design. Part of the reason this was done was to implement Transport Adapters, originally described here. Transport Adapters provide a mechanism to define interaction methods for an HTTP service. In particular, they allow you to apply per-service configuration.

Requests ships with a single Transport Adapter, the HTTPAdapter. This adapter provides the default Requests interaction with HTTP and HTTPS using the powerful urllib3 library. Whenever a Requests Session is initialized, one of these is attached to the Session object for HTTP, and one for HTTPS.

Requests enables users to create and use their own Transport Adapters that provide specific functionality. Once created, a Transport Adapter can be mounted to a Session object, along with an indication of which web services it should apply to.

>>> s = requests.Session()
>>> s.mount('http://www.github.com', MyAdapter())

The mount call registers a specific instance of a Transport Adapter to a prefix. Once mounted, any HTTP request made using that session whose URL starts with the given prefix will use the given Transport Adapter.

Many of the details of implementing a Transport Adapter are beyond the scope of this documentation, but take a look at the next example for a simple SSL use- case. For more than that, you might look at subclassing requests.adapters.BaseAdapter.

Example: Specific SSL Version

The Requests team has made a specific choice to use whatever SSL version is default in the underlying library (urllib3). Normally this is fine, but from time to time, you might find yourself needing to connect to a service-endpoint that uses a version that isn’t compatible with the default.

You can use Transport Adapters for this by taking most of the existing implementation of HTTPAdapter, and adding a parameter ssl_version that gets passed-through to urllib3. We’ll make a TA that instructs the library to use SSLv3:

import ssl
from requests.adapters import HTTPAdapter
from requests.packages.urllib3.poolmanager import PoolManager
class Ssl3HttpAdapter(HTTPAdapter):
    """"Transport adapter" that allows us to use SSLv3."""
    def init_poolmanager(self, connections, maxsize, block=False):
        self.poolmanager = PoolManager(
            num_pools=connections, maxsize=maxsize,
            block=block, ssl_version=ssl.PROTOCOL_SSLv3)