Requests: HTTP for Humans

Release v2.18.1. (Installation)

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

Warning: Recreational use of the Python standard library for HTTP 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, thanks to urllib3.

User Testimonials

Twitter, Spotify, Microsoft, Amazon, Lyft, BuzzFeed, Reddit, The NSA, Her Majesty's Government, Google, Twilio, Runscope, Mozilla, Heroku, PayPal, NPR, Obama for America, Transifex, Native Instruments, The Washington Post, SoundCloud, Kippt, 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 Kenneth Reitz'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 Kenneth Reitz'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 11,000,000 downloads every month. All the cool kids are doing it!

Beloved Features

Requests is ready for today's web.

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

Requests officially supports Python 2.6–2.7 & 3.3–3.7, and runs great on PyPy.

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.