The request and response objects wrap the WSGI environment or the return value from a WSGI application so that it is another WSGI application (wraps a whole application).
Your WSGI application is always passed two arguments. The WSGI “environment” and the WSGI start_response function that is used to start the response phase. The Request class wraps the environ for easier access to request variables (form data, request headers etc.).
The Response on the other hand is a standard WSGI application that you can create. The simple hello world in Werkzeug looks like this:
from werkzeug.wrappers import Response
application = Response('Hello World!')
To make it more useful you can replace it with a function and do some processing:
from werkzeug.wrappers import Request, Response
def application(environ, start_response):
request = Request(environ)
response = Response("Hello %s!" % request.args.get('name', 'World!'))
return response(environ, start_response)
Because this is a very common task the Request object provides a helper for that. The above code can be rewritten like this:
from werkzeug.wrappers import Request, Response
@Request.application
def application(request):
return Response("Hello %s!" % request.args.get('name', 'World!'))
The application is still a valid WSGI application that accepts the environment and start_response callable.
The implementation of the Werkzeug request and response objects are trying to guard you from common pitfalls by disallowing certain things as much as possible. This serves two purposes: high performance and avoiding of pitfalls.
For the request object the following rules apply:
For the response object the following rules apply:
These objects implement a common set of operations. They are missing fancy addon functionality like user agent parsing or etag handling. These features are available by mixing in various mixin classes or using Request and Response.
Very basic request object. This does not implement advanced stuff like entity tag parsing or cache controls. The request object is created with the WSGI environment as first argument and will add itself to the WSGI environment as 'werkzeug.request' unless it’s created with populate_request set to False.
There are a couple of mixins available that add additional functionality to the request object, there is also a class called Request which subclasses BaseRequest and all the important mixins.
It’s a good idea to create a custom subclass of the BaseRequest and add missing functionality either via mixins or direct implementation. Here an example for such subclasses:
from werkzeug.wrappers import BaseRequest, ETagRequestMixin
class Request(BaseRequest, ETagRequestMixin):
pass
Request objects are read only. As of 0.5 modifications are not allowed in any place. Unlike the lower level parsing functions the request object will use immutable objects everywhere possible.
Per default the request object will assume all the text data is utf-8 encoded. Please refer to the unicode chapter for more details about customizing the behavior.
Per default the request object will be added to the WSGI environment as werkzeug.request to support the debugging system. If you don’t want that, set populate_request to False.
If shallow is True the environment is initialized as shallow object around the environ. Every operation that would modify the environ in any way (such as consuming form data) raises an exception unless the shallow attribute is explicitly set to False. This is useful for middlewares where you don’t want to consume the form data by accident. A shallow request is not populated to the WSGI environment.
Changed in version 0.5: read-only mode was enforced by using immutables classes for all data.
The WSGI environment that the request object uses for data retrival.
Called to get a stream for the file upload.
This must provide a file-like class with read(), readline() and seek() methods that is both writeable and readable.
The default implementation returns a temporary file if the total content length is higher than 500KB. Because many browsers do not provide a content length for the files only the total content length matters.
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If a forwarded header exists this is a list of all ip addresses from the client ip to the last proxy server.
Decorate a function as responder that accepts the request as first argument. This works like the responder() decorator but the function is passed the request object as first argument and the request object will be closed automatically:
@Request.application
def my_wsgi_app(request):
return Response('Hello World!')
Parameters: | f – the WSGI callable to decorate |
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Returns: | a new WSGI callable |
The parsed URL parameters. By default an ImmutableMultiDict is returned from this function. This can be changed by setting parameter_storage_class to a different type. This might be necessary if the order of the form data is important.
the charset for the request, defaults to utf-8
Closes associated resources of this request object. This closes all file handles explicitly. You can also use the request object in a with statement with will automatically close it.
New in version 0.9.
Read only access to the retrieved cookie values as dictionary.
the type to be used for dict values from the incoming WSGI environment. By default an ImmutableTypeConversionDict is used (for example for cookies).
New in version 0.6.
alias of ImmutableTypeConversionDict
Indicates weather the data descriptor should be allowed to read and buffer up the input stream. By default it’s enabled.
New in version 0.9.
the error handling procedure for errors, defaults to ‘replace’
MultiDict object containing all uploaded files. Each key in files is the name from the <input type="file" name="">. Each value in files is a Werkzeug FileStorage object.
Note that files will only contain data if the request method was POST, PUT or PATCH and the <form> that posted to the request had enctype="multipart/form-data". It will be empty otherwise.
See the MultiDict / FileStorage documentation for more details about the used data structure.
The form parameters. By default an ImmutableMultiDict is returned from this function. This can be changed by setting parameter_storage_class to a different type. This might be necessary if the order of the form data is important.
The form data parser that shoud be used. Can be replaced to customize the form date parsing.
alias of FormDataParser
Create a new request object based on the values provided. If environ is given missing values are filled from there. This method is useful for small scripts when you need to simulate a request from an URL. Do not use this method for unittesting, there is a full featured client object (Client) that allows to create multipart requests, support for cookies etc.
This accepts the same options as the EnvironBuilder.
Changed in version 0.5: This method now accepts the same arguments as EnvironBuilder. Because of this the environ parameter is now called environ_overrides.
Returns: | request object |
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Requested path as unicode, including the query string.
This reads the buffered incoming data from the client into one bytestring. By default this is cached but that behavior can be changed by setting cache to False.
Usually it’s a bad idea to call this method without checking the content length first as a client could send dozens of megabytes or more to cause memory problems on the server.
Note that if the form data was already parsed this method will not return anything as form data parsing does not cache the data like this method does. To implicitly invoke form data parsing function set parse_form_data to True. When this is done the return value of this method will be an empty string if the form parser handles the data. This generally is not necessary as if the whole data is cached (which is the default) the form parser will used the cached data to parse the form data. Please be generally aware of checking the content length first in any case before calling this method to avoid exhausting server memory.
If as_text is set to True the return value will be a decoded unicode string.
New in version 0.9.
The headers from the WSGI environ as immutable EnvironHeaders.
Just the host including the port if available.
Just the host with scheme as IRI.
boolean that is True if the application is served by a WSGI server that spawns multiple processes.
boolean that is True if the application is served by a multithreaded WSGI server.
boolean that is True if the application will be executed only once in a process lifetime. This is the case for CGI for example, but it’s not guaranteed that the exeuction only happens one time.
True if the request is secure.
True if the request was triggered via a JavaScript XMLHttpRequest. This only works with libraries that support the X-Requested-With header and set it to “XMLHttpRequest”. Libraries that do that are prototype, jQuery and Mochikit and probably some more.
the type to be used for list values from the incoming WSGI environment. By default an ImmutableList is used (for example for access_list).
New in version 0.6.
alias of ImmutableList
Creates the form data parser. Instanciates the form_data_parser_class with some parameters.
New in version 0.8.
the maximum content length. This is forwarded to the form data parsing function (parse_form_data()). When set and the form or files attribute is accessed and the parsing fails because more than the specified value is transmitted a RequestEntityTooLarge exception is raised.
Have a look at Dealing with Request Data for more details.
New in version 0.5.
the maximum form field size. This is forwarded to the form data parsing function (parse_form_data()). When set and the form or files attribute is accessed and the data in memory for post data is longer than the specified value a RequestEntityTooLarge exception is raised.
Have a look at Dealing with Request Data for more details.
New in version 0.5.
The transmission method. (For example 'GET' or 'POST').
the class to use for args and form. The default is an ImmutableMultiDict which supports multiple values per key. alternatively it makes sense to use an ImmutableOrderedMultiDict which preserves order or a ImmutableDict which is the fastest but only remembers the last key. It is also possible to use mutable structures, but this is not recommended.
New in version 0.6.
alias of ImmutableMultiDict
Requested path as unicode. This works a bit like the regular path info in the WSGI environment but will always include a leading slash, even if the URL root is accessed.
The URL parameters as raw bytestring.
The remote address of the client.
If the server supports user authentication, and the script is protected, this attribute contains the username the user has authenticated as.
URL scheme (http or https).
New in version 0.7.
The root path of the script without the trailing slash.
The stream to read incoming data from. Unlike input_stream this stream is properly guarded that you can’t accidentally read past the length of the input. Werkzeug will internally always refer to this stream to read data which makes it possible to wrap this object with a stream that does filtering.
Changed in version 0.9: This stream is now always available but might be consumed by the form parser later on. Previously the stream was only set if no parsing happened.
Optionally a list of hosts that is trusted by this request. By default all hosts are trusted which means that whatever the client sends the host is will be accepted. This is the recommended setup as a webserver should manually be set up to not route invalid hosts to the application.
New in version 0.9.
The reconstructed current URL as IRI.
The charset that is assumed for URLs. Defaults to the value of charset.
New in version 0.6.
The full URL root (with hostname), this is the application root as IRI.
Returns True if the request method carries content. As of Werkzeug 0.9 this will be the case if a content type is transmitted.
New in version 0.8.
Base response class. The most important fact about a response object is that it’s a regular WSGI application. It’s initialized with a couple of response parameters (headers, body, status code etc.) and will start a valid WSGI response when called with the environ and start response callable.
Because it’s a WSGI application itself processing usually ends before the actual response is sent to the server. This helps debugging systems because they can catch all the exceptions before responses are started.
Here a small example WSGI application that takes advantage of the response objects:
from werkzeug.wrappers import BaseResponse as Response
def index():
return Response('Index page')
def application(environ, start_response):
path = environ.get('PATH_INFO') or '/'
if path == '/':
response = index()
else:
response = Response('Not Found', status=404)
return response(environ, start_response)
Like BaseRequest which object is lacking a lot of functionality implemented in mixins. This gives you a better control about the actual API of your response objects, so you can create subclasses and add custom functionality. A full featured response object is available as Response which implements a couple of useful mixins.
To enforce a new type of already existing responses you can use the force_type() method. This is useful if you’re working with different subclasses of response objects and you want to post process them with a know interface.
Per default the request object will assume all the text data is utf-8 encoded. Please refer to the unicode chapter for more details about customizing the behavior.
Response can be any kind of iterable or string. If it’s a string it’s considered being an iterable with one item which is the string passed. Headers can be a list of tuples or a Headers object.
Special note for mimetype and content_type: For most mime types mimetype and content_type work the same, the difference affects only ‘text’ mimetypes. If the mimetype passed with mimetype is a mimetype starting with text/, the charset parameter of the response object is appended to it. In contrast the content_type parameter is always added as header unmodified.
Changed in version 0.5: the direct_passthrough parameter was added.
Parameters: |
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The application iterator. If constructed from a string this will be a list, otherwise the object provided as application iterator. (The first argument passed to BaseResponse)
A Headers object representing the response headers.
The response status as integer.
If direct_passthrough=True was passed to the response object or if this attribute was set to True before using the response object as WSGI application, the wrapped iterator is returned unchanged. This makes it possible to pass a special wsgi.file_wrapper to the response object. See wrap_file() for more details.
Process this response as WSGI application.
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Returns: | an application iterator |
This method can be called by methods that need a sequence. If mutable is true, it will also ensure that the response sequence is a standard Python list.
New in version 0.6.
Should this response object correct the location header to be RFC conformant? This is true by default.
New in version 0.8.
Should this response object automatically set the content-length header if possible? This is true by default.
New in version 0.8.
Returns the content length if available or None otherwise.
Adds a function to the internal list of functions that should be called as part of closing down the response. Since 0.7 this function also returns the function that was passed so that this can be used as a decorator.
New in version 0.6.
the charset of the response.
Close the wrapped response if possible. You can also use the object in a with statement which will automatically close it.
New in version 0.9: Can now be used in a with statement.
A descriptor that calls get_data() and set_data(). This should not be used and will eventually get deprecated.
the default mimetype if none is provided.
the default status if none is provided.
Delete a cookie. Fails silently if key doesn’t exist.
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Enforce that the WSGI response is a response object of the current type. Werkzeug will use the BaseResponse internally in many situations like the exceptions. If you call get_response() on an exception you will get back a regular BaseResponse object, even if you are using a custom subclass.
This method can enforce a given response type, and it will also convert arbitrary WSGI callables into response objects if an environ is provided:
# convert a Werkzeug response object into an instance of the
# MyResponseClass subclass.
response = MyResponseClass.force_type(response)
# convert any WSGI application into a response object
response = MyResponseClass.force_type(response, environ)
This is especially useful if you want to post-process responses in the main dispatcher and use functionality provided by your subclass.
Keep in mind that this will modify response objects in place if possible!
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Returns: | a response object. |
Call this method if you want to make your response object ready for being pickled. This buffers the generator if there is one. It will also set the Content-Length header to the length of the body.
Changed in version 0.6: The Content-Length header is now set.
Create a new response object from an application output. This works best if you pass it an application that returns a generator all the time. Sometimes applications may use the write() callable returned by the start_response function. This tries to resolve such edge cases automatically. But if you don’t get the expected output you should set buffered to True which enforces buffering.
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Returns: | a response object. |
Returns the application iterator for the given environ. Depending on the request method and the current status code the return value might be an empty response rather than the one from the response.
If the request method is HEAD or the status code is in a range where the HTTP specification requires an empty response, an empty iterable is returned.
New in version 0.6.
Parameters: | environ – the WSGI environment of the request. |
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Returns: | a response iterable. |
The string representation of the request body. Whenever you call this property the request iterable is encoded and flattened. This can lead to unwanted behavior if you stream big data.
This behavior can be disabled by setting implicit_sequence_conversion to False.
If as_text is set to True the return value will be a decoded unicode string.
New in version 0.9.
This is automatically called right before the response is started and returns headers modified for the given environment. It returns a copy of the headers from the response with some modifications applied if necessary.
For example the location header (if present) is joined with the root URL of the environment. Also the content length is automatically set to zero here for certain status codes.
Changed in version 0.6: Previously that function was called fix_headers and modified the response object in place. Also since 0.6, IRIs in location and content-location headers are handled properly.
Also starting with 0.6, Werkzeug will attempt to set the content length if it is able to figure it out on its own. This is the case if all the strings in the response iterable are already encoded and the iterable is buffered.
Parameters: | environ – the WSGI environment of the request. |
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Returns: | returns a new Headers object. |
Returns the final WSGI response as tuple. The first item in the tuple is the application iterator, the second the status and the third the list of headers. The response returned is created specially for the given environment. For example if the request method in the WSGI environment is 'HEAD' the response will be empty and only the headers and status code will be present.
New in version 0.6.
Parameters: | environ – the WSGI environment of the request. |
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Returns: | an (app_iter, status, headers) tuple. |
if set to False accessing properties on the response object will not try to consume the response iterator and convert it into a list.
New in version 0.6.2: That attribute was previously called implicit_seqence_conversion. (Notice the typo). If you did use this feature, you have to adapt your code to the name change.
If the iterator is buffered, this property will be True. A response object will consider an iterator to be buffered if the response attribute is a list or tuple.
New in version 0.6.
If the response is streamed (the response is not an iterable with a length information) this property is True. In this case streamed means that there is no information about the number of iterations. This is usually True if a generator is passed to the response object.
This is useful for checking before applying some sort of post filtering that should not take place for streamed responses.
Iter the response encoded with the encoding of the response. If the response object is invoked as WSGI application the return value of this method is used as application iterator unless direct_passthrough was activated.
Converts the response iterator in a list. By default this happens automatically if required. If implicit_sequence_conversion is disabled, this method is not automatically called and some properties might raise exceptions. This also encodes all the items.
New in version 0.6.
Sets a cookie. The parameters are the same as in the cookie Morsel object in the Python standard library but it accepts unicode data, too.
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Sets a new string as response. The value set must either by a unicode or bytestring. If a unicode string is set it’s encoded automatically to the charset of the response (utf-8 by default).
New in version 0.9.
The HTTP Status code
The HTTP Status code as number
Werkzeug also provides helper mixins for various HTTP related functionality such as etags, cache control, user agents etc. When subclassing you can mix those classes in to extend the functionality of the BaseRequest or BaseResponse object. Here a small example for a request object that parses accept headers:
from werkzeug.wrappers import AcceptMixin, BaseRequest
class Request(BaseRequest, AcceptMixin):
pass
The Request and Response classes subclass the BaseRequest and BaseResponse classes and implement all the mixins Werkzeug provides:
Full featured request object implementing the following mixins:
Full featured response object implementing the following mixins:
A mixin for classes with an environ attribute to get all the HTTP accept headers as Accept objects (or subclasses thereof).
List of charsets this client supports as CharsetAccept object.
List of encodings this client accepts. Encodings in a HTTP term are compression encodings such as gzip. For charsets have a look at accept_charset.
List of languages this client accepts as LanguageAccept object.
List of mimetypes this client supports as MIMEAccept object.
Adds an authorization property that represents the parsed value of the Authorization header as Authorization object.
The Authorization object in parsed form.
Add entity tag and cache descriptors to a request object or object with a WSGI environment available as environ. This not only provides access to etags but also to the cache control header.
A RequestCacheControl object for the incoming cache control headers.
The parsed If-Modified-Since header as datetime object.
The parsed If-Unmodified-Since header as datetime object.
Adds extra functionality to a response object for etag and cache handling. This mixin requires an object with at least a headers object that implements a dict like interface similar to Headers.
If you want the freeze() method to automatically add an etag, you have to mixin this method before the response base class. The default response class does not do that.
The Accept-Ranges header. Even though the name would indicate that multiple values are supported, it must be one string token only.
The values 'bytes' and 'none' are common.
New in version 0.7.
Add an etag for the current response if there is none yet.
The Cache-Control general-header field is used to specify directives that MUST be obeyed by all caching mechanisms along the request/response chain.
The Content-Range header as ContentRange object. Even if the header is not set it wil provide such an object for easier manipulation.
New in version 0.7.
Call this method if you want to make your response object ready for pickeling. This buffers the generator if there is one. This also sets the etag unless no_etag is set to True.
Return a tuple in the form (etag, is_weak). If there is no ETag the return value is (None, None).
Make the response conditional to the request. This method works best if an etag was defined for the response already. The add_etag method can be used to do that. If called without etag just the date header is set.
This does nothing if the request method in the request or environ is anything but GET or HEAD.
It does not remove the body of the response because that’s something the __call__() function does for us automatically.
Returns self so that you can do return resp.make_conditional(req) but modifies the object in-place.
Parameters: | request_or_environ – a request object or WSGI environment to be used to make the response conditional against. |
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Set the etag, and override the old one if there was one.
Mixin for BaseRequest subclasses. Classes that inherit from this mixin will automatically get a stream property that provides a write-only interface to the response iterable.
The response iterable as write-only stream.
A mixin for BaseRequest subclasses. Request objects that mix this class in will automatically get descriptors for a couple of HTTP headers with automatic type conversion.
New in version 0.5.
The Content-Encoding entity-header field is used as a modifier to the media-type. When present, its value indicates what additional content codings have been applied to the entity-body, and thus what decoding mechanisms must be applied in order to obtain the media-type referenced by the Content-Type header field.
New in version 0.9.
The Content-Length entity-header field indicates the size of the entity-body in bytes or, in the case of the HEAD method, the size of the entity-body that would have been sent had the request been a GET.
The Content-MD5 entity-header field, as defined in RFC 1864, is an MD5 digest of the entity-body for the purpose of providing an end-to-end message integrity check (MIC) of the entity-body. (Note: a MIC is good for detecting accidental modification of the entity-body in transit, but is not proof against malicious attacks.)
New in version 0.9.
The Content-Type entity-header field indicates the media type of the entity-body sent to the recipient or, in the case of the HEAD method, the media type that would have been sent had the request been a GET.
The Date general-header field represents the date and time at which the message was originated, having the same semantics as orig-date in RFC 822.
The Max-Forwards request-header field provides a mechanism with the TRACE and OPTIONS methods to limit the number of proxies or gateways that can forward the request to the next inbound server.
Like content_type but without parameters (eg, without charset, type etc.). For example if the content type is text/html; charset=utf-8 the mimetype would be 'text/html'.
The mimetype parameters as dict. For example if the content type is text/html; charset=utf-8 the params would be {'charset': 'utf-8'}.
The Pragma general-header field is used to include implementation-specific directives that might apply to any recipient along the request/response chain. All pragma directives specify optional behavior from the viewpoint of the protocol; however, some systems MAY require that behavior be consistent with the directives.
The Referer[sic] request-header field allows the client to specify, for the server’s benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from which the Request-URI was obtained (the “referrer”, although the header field is misspelled).
A mixin for BaseResponse subclasses. Response objects that mix this class in will automatically get descriptors for a couple of HTTP headers with automatic type conversion.
The Age response-header field conveys the sender’s estimate of the amount of time since the response (or its revalidation) was generated at the origin server.
Age values are non-negative decimal integers, representing time in seconds.
The Allow entity-header field lists the set of methods supported by the resource identified by the Request-URI. The purpose of this field is strictly to inform the recipient of valid methods associated with the resource. An Allow header field MUST be present in a 405 (Method Not Allowed) response.
The Content-Encoding entity-header field is used as a modifier to the media-type. When present, its value indicates what additional content codings have been applied to the entity-body, and thus what decoding mechanisms must be applied in order to obtain the media-type referenced by the Content-Type header field.
The Content-Language entity-header field describes the natural language(s) of the intended audience for the enclosed entity. Note that this might not be equivalent to all the languages used within the entity-body.
The Content-Length entity-header field indicates the size of the entity-body, in decimal number of OCTETs, sent to the recipient or, in the case of the HEAD method, the size of the entity-body that would have been sent had the request been a GET.
The Content-Location entity-header field MAY be used to supply the resource location for the entity enclosed in the message when that entity is accessible from a location separate from the requested resource’s URI.
The Content-MD5 entity-header field, as defined in RFC 1864, is an MD5 digest of the entity-body for the purpose of providing an end-to-end message integrity check (MIC) of the entity-body. (Note: a MIC is good for detecting accidental modification of the entity-body in transit, but is not proof against malicious attacks.)
The Content-Type entity-header field indicates the media type of the entity-body sent to the recipient or, in the case of the HEAD method, the media type that would have been sent had the request been a GET.
The Date general-header field represents the date and time at which the message was originated, having the same semantics as orig-date in RFC 822.
The Expires entity-header field gives the date/time after which the response is considered stale. A stale cache entry may not normally be returned by a cache.
The Last-Modified entity-header field indicates the date and time at which the origin server believes the variant was last modified.
The Location response-header field is used to redirect the recipient to a location other than the Request-URI for completion of the request or identification of a new resource.
The mimetype (content type without charset etc.)
The mimetype parameters as dict. For example if the content type is text/html; charset=utf-8 the params would be {'charset': 'utf-8'}.
New in version 0.5.
The Retry-After response-header field can be used with a 503 (Service Unavailable) response to indicate how long the service is expected to be unavailable to the requesting client.
Time in seconds until expiration or date.
The Vary field value indicates the set of request-header fields that fully determines, while the response is fresh, whether a cache is permitted to use the response to reply to a subsequent request without revalidation.
Adds a www_authenticate property to a response object.
The WWW-Authenticate header in a parsed form.