Interacting with a web app using the requests library

In this section, we'll start to write Python code to perform HTTP requests using the requests library.

Requests library

Requests is an Apache 2 licensed HTTP library written in Python. It was created to reduce the complexity and work needed when using urllib2 and other HTTP libraries available at the moment.

This is an example of the code needed to perform a request to api.github.com using authentication when using the urllib2 library:

import urllib2

gh_url = 'https://api.github.com'

req = urllib2.Request(gh_url)

password_manager = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
password_manager.add_password(None, gh_url, 'user', 'pass')

auth_manager = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_manager)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(auth_manager)

urllib2.install_opener(opener)

handler = urllib2.urlopen(req)

print handler.getcode()
print handler.headers.getheader('content-type')

This is the same function but using the requests library:

import requests...