Requests → Niquests Guide

If you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in Niquests. We’re thrilled to have you onboard.

This section will cover two use cases:

  • I am a developer that regularly drive Requests

  • I am a library maintainer that depend on Requests

Developer migration

Niquests aims to be as compatible as possible with Requests, and that is with confidence that you can migrate to Niquests without breaking changes.

import requests
requests.get(...)

Would turn into either

import niquests
niquests.get(...)

Or simply

import niquests as requests
requests.get(...)

Tip

If you were used to use urllib3.Timeout or urllib3.Retry you can either keep them as-is or use our fully compatible niquests.RetryConfiguration or niquests.TimeoutConfiguration instead.

If you were used to depends on urllib3.

from urllib3 import Timeout
import requests

Will now become:

import niquests
from niquests.packages.urllib3 import Timeout

Note

urllib3 is safely aliased as niquests.packages.urllib3. Using the alias provided by Niquests is safer.

Maintainer migration

In order to migrate your library with confidence, you’ll have to also adjust your tests. The library itself (sources) should be really easy to migrate (cf. developer migration) but the tests may be harder to adapt.

The main reason behind this difficulty is often related to a strong tie with third-party mocking library such as responses.

To overcome this, we will introduce you to a clever bypass. If you are using pytest, do the following in your conftest.py, see https://docs.pytest.org/en/6.2.x/fixture.html#conftest-py-sharing-fixtures-across-multiple-files for more information. (The goal would simply to execute the following piece of code before the tests)

from sys import modules

import niquests
import requests
from niquests.packages import urllib3

# the mock utility 'response' only works with 'requests'
modules["requests"] = niquests
modules["requests.adapters"] = niquests.adapters
modules["requests.exceptions"] = niquests.exceptions
modules["requests.compat"] = requests.compat
modules["requests.packages.urllib3"] = urllib3

Warning

This code sample is only to be executed in a development environment, it permit to fool the third-party dependencies that have a strong tie on Requests.

Warning

Some pytest plugins may load/import Requests at startup. Disable the plugin auto-loading first by either passing PYTEST_DISABLE_PLUGIN_AUTOLOAD=1 (in environment) or pytest -p "no:pytest-betamax" in CLI parameters. Replace pytest-betamax by the name of the target plugin. To find out the name of the plugin auto-loaded, execute pytest --trace-config as the name aren’t usually what you would expect them to be.