Sessions

I'm extremely happy to announce that Requests now has support for sessions!

A session is created with a simple context manager. The resulting object has a method for each type of request, just like Requests itself.

Any optional parameters can be passed to requests.session, and will be included in each Request method call. Cookies are also persisted throughout all requests within a session.

with requests.session(auth=('username', 'password')) as s:

    r = s.get('https://api.github.com')

    r.status_code
    # 200

Learn more about sessions.

Status Code Reference

When reading HTTP code, remembering the exact meaning for every status_code can be difficult. Especially if you're working with a robust API. So, I've included a flexible lookup object to reference a status_code within your code.

>>> requests.codes.ok
200

>>> requests.codes.im_a_teapot
418

>>> requests.codes['precondition_failed']
412

Dict Cookies

Requests has had CookieJar support for a while, but that's far from ideal. CookieJars require an enormous amount of manual code. So, now you can give Requests a simple dictionary wherever it expects a CookieJar, and it'll automatically generate a CookieJar for you!

Best yet, if a server responds with Cookies in any request, you'll have a simple dictionary waiting for you in Response.cookies. If you want the full CookieJar, you can access it at Response.request.cookiejar.

Hook System

I've added a new hooks system for both signaling and modifying the method arguments, requests, and responses during the request lifecycle.

This will be extremely useful for using Requests to wrap web service APIs. Adding custom authentication mechanisms (OAuth anyone?) should be as simple as a few callbacks within a session.

Learn more about Hooks.

&c

I saw a large number of users relying on the order of the request function parmaters, instead of naming the arguments explicitly. So, now everything but url (and sometimes data) is passed via **kwargs, so you have to do things properly. This also gives me some flexiblity in making API decisions in the future.

Community Update

This weekend, Requests had its biggest explosion ever. The documentation has been accessed 43,000+ times by 25,000+ unique visitors in the past 30 days. The repo is approaching 700 watchers on GitHub (trailing just behind Celery), and the latest release has been downloaded over 2000 times from PyPi in the last month alone.

Another big milestone: we now have 25 contributors! Many thanks to everyone involved :)

Changelog

Here's a full list of what's new on v0.6.0:

• New callback hook system
• New persistent sessions object and context manager
• Transparent Dict-cookie handling
• Status code reference object
• Removed Response.cached
• Added Response.request
• All args are kwargs
• Relative redirect support
• HTTPError handling improvements
• Improved https testing
• Bugfixes

Source Code

Requests is open source (ISC Licensed), and will make your world a better place. I promise :)

• Code on GitHub
• python-requests.org