README

Requests







Requests is a simple, yet elegant, HTTP library.

python
 import requests
 r = requests.get('https://httpbin.org/basic-auth/user/pass', auth=('user', 'pass'))
 r.status_code
200
 r.headers['content-type']
'application/json; charset=utf8'
 r.encoding
'utf-8'
 r.text
'{"authenticated": true, ...'
 r.json()
{'authenticated': True, ...}


Requests allows you to send HTTP/1.1 requests extremely easily. There’s no need to manually add query strings to your URLs, or to form-encode your PUT & POST data — but nowadays, just use the json method!

Requests is one of the most downloaded Python packages today, pulling in around 300M downloads / week — according to GitHub, Requests is currently depended upon by 4,000,000+ repositories.

 Installing Requests and Supported Versions

Requests is available on PyPI:

console
$ python -m pip install requests


Requests officially supports Python 3.10+.

 Supported Features & Best–Practices

Requests is ready for the demands of building robust and reliable HTTP–speaking applications, for the needs of today.

- Keep-Alive & Connection Pooling
- International Domains and URLs
- Sessions with Cookie Persistence
- Browser-style TLS/SSL Verification
- Basic & Digest Authentication
- Familiar dict–like Cookies
- Automatic Content Decompression and Decoding
- Multi-part File Uploads
- SOCKS Proxy Support
- Connection Timeouts
- Streaming Downloads
- Automatic honoring of .netrc
- Chunked HTTP Requests

 Cloning the repository

When cloning the Requests repository, you may need to add the -c
fetch.fsck.badTimezone=ignore flag to avoid an error about a bad commit timestamp (see
this issue for more background):

shell
git clone -c fetch.fsck.badTimezone=ignore https://github.com/psf/requests.git


You can also apply this setting to your global Git config:

shell
git config --global fetch.fsck.badTimezone ignore


---

Top issues

Latest release

2.34.2 (2026-05-14)
-------------------
- Moved headers input type back to Mapping to avoid invariance issues with MutableMapping and inferred dict types. Users calling Request.headers.update() may need to narrow typing in their code. (7441)

Full Changelog: https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/main/HISTORY.md2342-2026-05-14