Python’s Requests Library (Guide)

Python’s Requests Library (Guide)

by Alex Ronquillo intermediate web-dev
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Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Making HTTP Requests With Python

The requests library is the de facto standard for making HTTP requests in Python. It abstracts the complexities of making requests behind a beautiful, simple API so that you can focus on interacting with services and consuming data in your application.

Throughout this article, you’ll see some of the most useful features that requests has to offer as well as how to customize and optimize those features for different situations you may come across. You’ll also learn how to use requests in an efficient way as well as how to prevent requests to external services from slowing down your application.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to:

  • Make requests using the most common HTTP methods
  • Customize your requests’ headers and data, using the query string and message body
  • Inspect data from your requests and responses
  • Make authenticated requests
  • Configure your requests to help prevent your application from backing up or slowing down

Though I’ve tried to include as much information as you need to understand the features and examples included in this article, I do assume a very basic general knowledge of HTTP. That said, you still may be able to follow along fine anyway.

Now that that is out of the way, let’s dive in and see how you can use requests in your application!

Getting Started With requests

Let’s begin by installing the requests library. To do so, run the following command:

Shell 
$ pip install requests

If you prefer to use Pipenv for managing Python packages, you can run the following:

Shell 
$ pipenv install requests

Once requests is installed, you can use it in your application. Importing requests looks like this:

Python 
import requests

Now that you’re all set up, it’s time to begin your journey through requests. Your first goal will be learning how to make a GET request.

The GET Request

HTTP methods such as GET and POST, determine which action you’re trying to perform when making an HTTP request. Besides GET and POST, there are several other common methods that you’ll use later in this tutorial.

One of the most common HTTP methods is GET. The GET method indicates that you’re trying to get or retrieve data from a specified resource. To make a GET request, invoke requests.get().

To test this out, you can make a GET request to GitHub’s Root REST API by calling get() with the following URL:

Python 
>>> requests.get('https://api.github.com')
<Response [200]>

Congratulations! You’ve made your first request. Let’s dive a little deeper into the response of that request.

The Response

A Response is a powerful object for inspecting the results of the request. Let’s make that same request again, but this time store the return value in a variable so that you can get a closer look at its attributes and behaviors:

Python 
>>> response = requests.get('https://api.github.com')

In this example, you’ve captured the return value of get(), which is an instance of Response, and stored it in a variable called response. You can now use response to see a lot of information about the results of your GET request.

Status Codes

The first bit of information that you can gather from Response is the status code. A status code informs you of the status of the request.

For example, a 200 OK status means that your request was successful, whereas a 404 NOT FOUND status means that the resource you were looking for was not found. There are many other possible status codes as well to give you specific insights into what happened with your request.

By accessing .status_code, you can see the status code that the server returned:

Python 
>>> response.status_code
200

.status_code returned a 200, which means your request was successful and the server responded with the data you were requesting.

Sometimes, you might want to use this information to make decisions in your code:

Python 
if response.status_code == 200:
    print('Success!')
elif response.status_code == 404:
    print('Not Found.')

With this logic, if the server returns a 200 status code, your program will print Success!. If the result is a 404, your program will print Not Found.

requests goes one step further in simplifying this process for you. If you use a Response instance in a conditional expression, it will evaluate to True if the status code was between 200 and 400, and False otherwise.

Therefore, you can simplify the last example by rewriting the if statement:

Python 
if response:
    print('Success!')
else