notrequests 0.3

Like Requests, but using urllib2.

A Python wrapper for the built-in urllib2 module. The API is compatible with the excellent Requests library, but omitting features such as sessions and support for keep-alive.

Notrequests is intended for doing HTTP requests on Google App Engine where Requests has some disadvantages.

It is not Python 3 compatible (yet).

Installation

From PyPI:

$ pip install notrequests

Or download and run setup as normal:

$ curl -L -o notrequests.zip https://github.com/davidwtbuxton/notrequests/archive/master.zip
$ unzip notrequests.zip
$ cd notrequests-master
$ python setup.py install

Usage

Notrequests is compatible with the Requests API (or it tries to be).

>>> import notrequests
>>>
>>> response = notrequests.get('http://httpbin.org/get')
>>> response.status_code == notrequests.codes.ok
True

But it doesn’t do everything that Requests does. There’s no session support, no keep-alive support and it reads the entire response into memory.

The response body is available as a byte string or as unicode, which relies on the server having sent a valid content-type header.

>>> response = notrequests.get('http://httpbin.org/encoding/utf8')
>>> response.headers['content-type']
'text/html; charset=utf-8'
>>> type(response.content)
<type 'str'>
>>> type(response.text)
<type 'unicode'>

Notrequests uses urllib2 but behaves more like Requests. So it won’t throw an exception on 4xx and 5xx responses.

>>> response = notrequests.get('http://httpbin.org/status/404')
>>> response.status_code == notrequests.codes.not_found
True

You can do basic auth just like Requests (but not other authentication types):

>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/basic-auth/alice/secret'
>>> response = notrequests.get(url)
>>> response.status_code
401
>>> response = notrequests.get(url, auth=('alice', 'secret'))
>>> response.status_code
200

And send and decode JSON:

>>> import pprint
>>> response = notrequests.put('http://httpbin.org/put', json={'foo': ['bar', 'baz']})
>>> data = response.json()
>>> pprint.pprint(data)
{u'args': {},
 u'data': u'{"foo": ["bar", "baz"]}',
 u'files': {},
 u'form': {},
 u'headers': {u'Accept-Encoding': u'identity',
              u'Content-Length': u'23',
              u'Content-Type': u'application/json',
              u'Host': u'httpbin.org',
              u'User-Agent': u'notrequests/0.1'},
 u'json': {u'foo': [u'bar', u'baz']},
 u'origin': u'10.10.10.1',
 u'url': u'http://httpbin.org/put'}

If the server sent ‘Link’ headers in the response (often used by APIs to give links to the next page of results) then you can get the parsed links straight from the response object:

>>> response.headers['Link']
'<https://example.com/?page=2>; rel="next"'
>>> response.links['next']['url']
'https://example.com/?page=2'

There’s also support for uploading files:

>>> import io
>>> fileobj = io.BytesIO('foo bar baz')
>>> response = notrequests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', files={'upload': fileobj})
>>> response.json()['files']
{u'upload': 'foo bar baz'}

As with Requests, the keys in the files dict are the form field input names and the values in the files dict can be a 2-tuple of file name with file object or byte string:

>>> files = {'upload': ('my-file.txt', b'Foo\nbar\nbaz.')}
>>> response = notrequests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', files=files)
>>> print response.request.data
--10.10.10.1.503.2717.1443987498.810.2
Content-Disposition: file; name="upload"; filename="my-file.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain

Foo
bar
baz.
--10.10.10.1.503.2717.1443987498.810.2--

API compatibility

These are some features of the Requests API that Notrequests has not implemented. It isn’t a complete list, and it would be nice to have better support.

• Sessions

• Response.history

• Response.raise_for_status()

• Streaming uploads / downloads and iterating over data

• Alternate names for status codes

• Proxies

Tests

Run the tests with tox.

By default the tests make requests to http://httpbin.org, but you can run a local instance which will speed things up.

$ pip install httpbin gunicorn
$ gunicorn --bind 127.0.0.1:8888 httpbin:app
$ export NOTREQUESTS_TEST_URL="http://127.0.0.1:8888"
$ tox

Why not use Requests?

Google App Engine patches httplib in the standard library to use its urlfetch service, and restricts the sockets API to paid applications. Requests does not use httplib and uses sockets.

If you want to use the app identity service to authenticate connections between App Engine applications you have to use the urlfetch service, you cannot use Requests. Notrequests works because it uses urllib2, which uses httplib.