README.rst
1Requests: HTTP for Humans
2=========================
3
4.. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/requests.svg
5 :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/requests
6
7.. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/dm/requests.svg
8 :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/requests
9
10
11
12
13Requests is an Apache2 Licensed HTTP library, written in Python, for human
14beings.
15
16Most existing Python modules for sending HTTP requests are extremely
17verbose and cumbersome. Python's builtin urllib2 module provides most of
18the HTTP capabilities you should need, but the api is thoroughly broken.
19It requires an enormous amount of work (even method overrides) to
20perform the simplest of tasks.
21
22Things shouldn't be this way. Not in Python.
23
24.. code-block:: python
25
26 >>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com', auth=('user', 'pass'))
27 >>> r.status_code
28 204
29 >>> r.headers['content-type']
30 'application/json'
31 >>> r.text
32 ...
33
34See `the same code, without Requests <https://gist.github.com/973705>`_.
35
36Requests allow you to send HTTP/1.1 requests. You can add headers, form data,
37multipart files, and parameters with simple Python dictionaries, and access the
38response data in the same way. It's powered by httplib and `urllib3
39<https://github.com/shazow/urllib3>`_, but it does all the hard work and crazy
40hacks for you.
41
42
43Features
44--------
45
46- International Domains and URLs
47- Keep-Alive & Connection Pooling
48- Sessions with Cookie Persistence
49- Browser-style SSL Verification
50- Basic/Digest Authentication
51- Elegant Key/Value Cookies
52- Automatic Decompression
53- Unicode Response Bodies
54- Multipart File Uploads
55- Connection Timeouts
56- Thread-safety
57- HTTP(S) proxy support
58
59
60Installation
61------------
62
63To install Requests, simply:
64
65.. code-block:: bash
66
67 $ pip install requests
68
69
70Documentation
71-------------
72
73Documentation is available at http://docs.python-requests.org/.
74
75
76Contribute
77----------
78
79#. Check for open issues or open a fresh issue to start a discussion around a feature idea or a bug. There is a `Contributor Friendly`_ tag for issues that should be ideal for people who are not very familiar with the codebase yet.
80#. Fork `the repository`_ on GitHub to start making your changes to the **master** branch (or branch off of it).
81#. Write a test which shows that the bug was fixed or that the feature works as expected.
82#. Send a pull request and bug the maintainer until it gets merged and published. :) Make sure to add yourself to AUTHORS_.
83
84.. _`the repository`: http://github.com/kennethreitz/requests
85.. _AUTHORS: https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/blob/master/AUTHORS.rst
86.. _Contributor Friendly: https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/issues?direction=desc&labels=Contributor+Friendly&page=1&sort=updated&state=open
87
