Quickstart

Eager to get started? This page gives a good introduction in how to get started with Niquests.

First, make sure that:

• Niquests is installed

• Niquests is up-to-date

Let’s get started with some simple examples.

Make a Request

Making a request with Niquests is very simple.

Begin by importing the Niquests module:

>>> import niquests

Now, let’s try to get a webpage. For this example, let’s get GitHub’s public timeline:

>>> r = niquests.get('https://api.github.com/events')

Now, we have a Response object called r. We can get all the information we need from this object.

Niquests’ simple API means that all forms of HTTP request are as obvious. For example, this is how you make an HTTP POST request:

>>> r = niquests.post('https://httpbin.org/post', data={'key': 'value'})

Nice, right? What about the other HTTP request types: PUT, DELETE, HEAD and OPTIONS? These are all just as simple:

>>> r = niquests.put('https://httpbin.org/put', data={'key': 'value'})
>>> r = niquests.delete('https://httpbin.org/delete')
>>> r = niquests.head('https://httpbin.org/get')
>>> r = niquests.options('https://httpbin.org/get')

That’s all well and good, but it’s also only the start of what Niquests can do.

Passing Parameters In URLs

You often want to send some sort of data in the URL’s query string. If you were constructing the URL by hand, this data would be given as key/value pairs in the URL after a question mark, e.g. httpbin.org/get?key=val. Niquests allows you to provide these arguments as a dictionary of strings, using the params keyword argument. As an example, if you wanted to pass key1=value1 and key2=value2 to httpbin.org/get, you would use the following code:

>>> payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}
>>> r = niquests.get('https://httpbin.org/get', params=payload)

You can see that the URL has been correctly encoded by printing the URL:

>>> print(r.url)
https://httpbin.org/get?key2=value2&key1=value1

Note that any dictionary key whose value is None will not be added to the URL’s query string.

You can also pass a list of items as a value:

>>> payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': ['value2', 'value3']}

>>> r = niquests.get('https://httpbin.org/get', params=payload)
>>> print(r.url)
https://httpbin.org/get?key1=value1&key2=value2&key2=value3

Response Content

We can read the content of the server’s response. Consider the GitHub timeline again:

>>> import niquests

>>> r = niquests.get('https://api.github.com/events')
>>> r.text
'[{"repository":{"open_issues":0,"url":"https://github.com/...

Niquests will automatically decode content from the server. Most unicode charsets are seamlessly decoded.

When you make a request, Niquests makes educated guesses about the encoding of the response based on the HTTP headers. The text encoding guessed by Niquests is used when you access r.text. You can find out what encoding Niquests is using, and change it, using the r.encoding property:

>>> r.encoding
'utf-8'
>>> r.encoding = 'ISO-8859-1'

Warning

If Niquests is unable to decode the content to string with confidence, it simply return None.

If you change the encoding, Niquests will use the new value of r.encoding whenever you call r.text. You might want to do this in any situation where you can apply special logic to work out what the encoding of the content will be. For example, HTML and XML have the ability to specify their encoding in their body. In situations like this, you should use r.content to find the encoding, and then set r.encoding. This will let you use r.text with the correct encoding.

Niquests will also use custom encodings in the event that you need them. If you have created your own encoding and registered it with the codecs module, you can simply use the codec name as the value of r.encoding and Niquests will handle the decoding for you.

Binary Response Content

You can also access the response body as bytes, for non-text requests:

>>> r.content
b'[{"repository":{"open_issues":0,"url":"https://github.com/...

The gzip and deflate transfer-encodings are automatically decoded for you.

The br transfer-encoding is automatically decoded for you if a Brotli library like brotli or brotlicffi is installed.

For example, to create an image from binary data returned by a request, you can use the following code:

>>> from PIL import Image
>>> from io import BytesIO

>>> i = Image.open(BytesIO(r.content))

JSON Response Content

There’s also a builtin JSON decoder, in case you’re dealing with JSON data:

>>> import requests

>>> r = niquests.get('https://api.github.com/events')
>>> r.json()
[{'repository': {'open_issues': 0, 'url': 'https://github.com/...

In case the JSON decoding fails, r.json() raises an exception. For example, if the response gets a 204 (No Content), or if the response contains invalid JSON, attempting r.json() raises niquests.exceptions.JSONDecodeError. This wrapper exception provides interoperability for multiple exceptions that may be thrown by different python versions and json serialization libraries.

It should be noted that the success of the call to r.json() does not indicate the success of the response. Some servers may return a JSON object in a failed response (e.g. error details with HTTP 500). Such JSON will be decoded and returned. To check that a request is successful, use r.raise_for_status() or check r.status_code is what you expect.

Note

Since Niquests 3.2, r.raise_for_status() is chainable as it returns self if everything went fine.

Raw Response Content

In the rare case that you’d like to get the raw socket response from the server, you can access r.raw. If you want to do this, make sure you set stream=True in your initial request. Once you do, you can do this:

>>> r = niquests.get('https://api.github.com/events', stream=True)

>>> r.raw
<urllib3.response.HTTPResponse object at 0x101194810>

>>> r.raw.read(10)
b'\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03'

In general, however, you should use a pattern like this to save what is being streamed to a file:

with open(filename, 'wb') as fd:
    for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=128):
        fd.write(chunk)

Using Response.iter_content will handle a lot of what you would otherwise have to handle when using Response.raw directly. When streaming a download, the above is the preferred and recommended way to retrieve the content. Note that chunk_size can be freely adjusted to a number that may better fit your use cases.

Note

An important note about using Response.iter_content versus Response.raw. Response.iter_content will automatically decode the gzip and deflate transfer-encodings. Response.raw is a raw stream of bytes – it does not transform the response content. If you really need access to the bytes as they were returned, use Response.raw.

Custom Headers

If you’d like to add HTTP headers to a request, simply pass in a dict to the headers parameter.

For example, we didn’t specify our user-agent in the previous example:

>>> url = 'https://api.github.com/some/endpoint'
>>> headers = {'user-agent': 'my-app/0.0.1'}

>>> r = niquests.get(url, headers=headers)

Note: Custom headers are given less precedence than more specific sources of information. For instance:

• Authorization headers set with headers= will be overridden if credentials are specified in .netrc, which in turn will be overridden by the auth= parameter. Niquests will search for the netrc file at ~/.netrc, ~/_netrc, or at the path specified by the NETRC environment variable.

• Authorization headers will be removed if you get redirected off-host.

• Proxy-Authorization headers will be overridden by proxy credentials provided in the URL.

• Content-Length headers will be overridden when we can determine the length of the content.

Furthermore, Niquests does not change its behavior at all based on which custom headers are specified. The headers are simply passed on into the final request.

Note: All header values must be a string, bytestring, or unicode. While permitted, it’s advised to avoid passing unicode header values.

More complicated POST requests

Typically, you want to send some form-encoded data — much like an HTML form. To do this, simply pass a dictionary to the data argument. Your dictionary of data will automatically be form-encoded when the request is made:

>>> payload = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}

>>> r = niquests.post('https://httpbin.org/post', data=payload)
>>> print(r.text)
{
  ...
  "form": {
    "key2": "value2",
    "key1": "value1"
  },
  ...
}

The data argument can also have multiple values for each key. This can be done by making data either a list of tuples or a dictionary with lists as values. This is particularly useful when the form has multiple elements that use the same key:

>>> payload_tuples = [('key1', 'value1'), ('key1', 'value2')]
>>> r1 = niquests.post('https://httpbin.org/post', data=payload_tuples)
>>> payload_dict = {'key1': ['value1', 'value2']}
>>> r2 = niquests.post('https://httpbin.org/post', data=payload_dict)
>>> print(r1.text)
{
  ...
  "form": {
    "key1": [
      "value1",
      "value2"
    ]
  },
  ...
}
>>> r1.text == r2.text
True

There are times that you may want to send data that is not form-encoded. If you pass in a string instead of a dict, that data will be posted directly.

For example, the GitHub API v3 accepts JSON-Encoded POST/PATCH data:

>>> import json

>>> url = 'https://api.github.com/some/endpoint'
>>> payload = {'some': 'data'}

>>> r = niquests.post(url, data=json.dumps(payload))

Please note that the above code will NOT add the Content-Type header (so in particular it will NOT set it to application/json).

If you need that header set and you don’t want to encode the dict yourself, you can also pass it directly using the json parameter (added in version 2.4.2) and it will be encoded automatically:

>>> url = 'https://api.github.com/some/endpoint'
>>> payload = {'some': 'data'}

>>> r = niquests.post(url, json=payload)

Note, the json parameter is ignored if either data or files is passed.

POST a Multipart Form-Data without File

Since Niquests 3.1.2 it is possible to overrule the default conversion to application/x-www-form-urlencoded type. You can submit a form-data by helping Niquests understand what you meant.

>>> url = 'https://httpbin.org/post'
>>> payload = {'some': 'data'}

>>> r = niquests.post(url, data=payload, headers={"Content-Type": "multipart/form-data"})

Now, instead of submitting a urlencoded body, as per the default, Niquests will send instead a proper form-data.

Note

You can also specify manually a boundary in the header value. Niquests will reuse it. Otherwise it will assign a random one.

POST a Multipart-Encoded File

Niquests makes it simple to upload Multipart-encoded files:

>>> url = 'https://httpbin.org/post'
>>> files = {'file': open('report.xls', 'rb')}

>>> r = niquests.post(url, files=files)
>>> r.text
{
  ...
  "files": {
    "file": "<censored...binary...data>"
  },
  ...
}

You can set the filename, content_type and headers explicitly:

>>> url = 'https://httpbin.org/post'
>>> files = {'file': ('report.xls', open('report.xls', 'rb'), 'application/vnd.ms-excel', {'Expires': '0'})}

>>> r = niquests.post(url, files=files)
>>> r.text
{
  ...
  "files": {
    "file": "<censored...binary...data>"
  },
  ...
}

If you want, you can send strings to be received as files:

>>> url = 'https://httpbin.org/post'
>>> files = {'file': ('report.csv', 'some,data,to,send\nanother,row,to,send\n')}

>>> r = niquests.post(url, files=files)
>>> r.text
{
  ...
  "files": {
    "file": "some,data,to,send\\nanother,row,to,send\\n"
  },
  ...
}

In the event you are posting a very large file as a multipart/form-data request, you may want to stream the request. By default, niquests does not support this, but there is a separate package which does - requests-toolbelt. You should read the toolbelt’s documentation for more details about how to use it.

For sending multiple files in one request refer to the advanced section.

Response Status Codes

We can check the response status code:

>>> r = niquests.get('https://httpbin.org/get')
>>> r.status_code
200

Niquests also comes with a built-in status code lookup object for easy reference:

>>> r.status_code == niquests.codes.ok
True

If we made a bad request (a 4XX client error or 5XX server error response), we can raise it with Response.raise_for_status():

>>> bad_r = niquests.get('https://httpbin.org/status/404')
>>> bad_r.status_code
404

>>> bad_r.raise_for_status()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "requests/models.py", line 832, in raise_for_status
    raise http_error
niquests.exceptions.HTTPError: 404 Client Error

But, since our status_code for r was 200, when we call raise_for_status() we get:

>>> r.raise_for_status()
None

All is well.

Response Headers

We can view the server’s response headers using a Python dictionary:

>>> r.headers
{
    'content-encoding': 'gzip',
    'transfer-encoding': 'chunked',
    'connection': 'close',
    'server': 'nginx/1.0.4',
    'x-runtime': '148ms',
    'etag': '"e1ca502697e5c9317743dc078f67693f"',
    'content-type': 'application/json'
}

The dictionary is special, though: it’s made just for HTTP headers. According to RFC 7230, HTTP Header names are case-insensitive.

So, we can access the headers using any capitalization we want:

>>> r.headers['Content-Type']
'application/json'

>>> r.headers.get('content-type')
'application/json'

It is also special in that the server could have sent the same header multiple times with different values, but requests combines them so they can be represented in the dictionary within a single mapping, as per RFC 7230:

A recipient MAY combine multiple header fields with the same field name into one “field-name: field-value” pair, without changing the semantics of the message, by appending each subsequent field value to the combined field value in order, separated by a comma.

It most cases you’d rather quickly access specific key element of headers. Fortunately, you can access HTTP headers as they were objects. Like so:

>>> r.oheaders.content_type.charset
'utf-8'
>>> r.oheaders.report_to.max_age
'604800'
>>> str(r.oheaders.date)
'Mon, 02 Oct 2023 05:34:48 GMT'
>>> from kiss_headers import get_polymorphic, Date
>>> h = get_polymorphic(r.oheaders.date, Date)
>>> repr(h.get_datetime())
datetime.datetime(2023, 10, 2, 5, 39, 46, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

To explore possibilities, visit the kiss-headers documentation at https://ousret.github.io/kiss-headers/

Cookies

If a response contains some Cookies, you can quickly access them:

>>> url = 'http://example.com/some/cookie/setting/url'
>>> r = niquests.get(url)

>>> r.cookies['example_cookie_name']
'example_cookie_value'

To send your own cookies to the server, you can use the cookies parameter:

>>> url = 'https://httpbin.org/cookies'
>>> cookies = dict(cookies_are='working')

>>> r = niquests.get(url, cookies=cookies)
>>> r.text
'{"cookies": {"cookies_are": "working"}}'

Cookies are returned in a RequestsCookieJar, which acts like a dict but also offers a more complete interface, suitable for use over multiple domains or paths. Cookie jars can also be passed in to requests:

>>> jar = niquests.cookies.RequestsCookieJar()
>>> jar.set('tasty_cookie', 'yum', domain='httpbin.org', path='/cookies')
>>> jar.set('gross_cookie', 'blech', domain='httpbin.org', path='/elsewhere')
>>> url = 'https://httpbin.org/cookies'
>>> r = niquests.get(url, cookies=jar)
>>> r.text
'{"cookies": {"tasty_cookie": "yum"}}'

Redirection and History

By default Niquests will perform location redirection for all verbs except HEAD.

We can use the history property of the Response object to track redirection.

The Response.history list contains the Response objects that were created in order to complete the request. The list is sorted from the oldest to the most recent response.

For example, GitHub redirects all HTTP requests to HTTPS:

>>> r = niquests.get('http://github.com/')

>>> r.url
'https://github.com/'

>>> r.status_code
200

>>> r.history
[<Response HTTP/2 [301]>]

If you’re using GET, OPTIONS, POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE, you can disable redirection handling with the allow_redirects parameter:

>>> r = niquests.get('http://github.com/', allow_redirects=False)

>>> r.status_code
301

>>> r.history
[]

If you’re using HEAD, you can enable redirection as well:

>>> r = niquests.head('http://github.com/', allow_redirects=True)

>>> r.url
'https://github.com/'

>>> r.history
[<Response HTTP/2 [301]>]

Timeouts

You can tell Niquests to stop waiting for a response after a given number of seconds with the timeout parameter. Nearly all production code should use this parameter in nearly all niquests. By default GET, HEAD, OPTIONS ships with a 30 seconds timeout delay and 120 seconds for the rest:

>>> niquests.get('https://github.com/', timeout=0.001)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
niquests.exceptions.Timeout: HTTPConnectionPool(host='github.com', port=80): Request timed out. (timeout=0.001)

Note

timeout is not a time limit on the entire response download; rather, an exception is raised if the server has not issued a response for timeout seconds (more precisely, if no bytes have been received on the underlying socket for timeout seconds). If no timeout is specified explicitly, requests use the default according to your HTTP verb. Either 30 seconds or 120 seconds.

Errors and Exceptions

In the event of a network problem (e.g. DNS failure, refused connection, etc), Niquests will raise a ConnectionError exception.

Response.raise_for_status() will raise an HTTPError if the HTTP request returned an unsuccessful status code.

If a request times out, a Timeout exception is raised.

If a request exceeds the configured number of maximum redirections, a TooManyRedirects exception is raised.

All exceptions that Niquests explicitly raises inherit from niquests.exceptions.RequestException.

HTTP/3 over QUIC

Niquests relies on urllib3.future that relies on the qh3 package. The underlying package may or may not be installed on your environment.

If it is not present, no HTTP/3 or QUIC support will be present.

If you uninstall the qh3 package it disable the support for HTTP/3 without breaking anything. On the overhand, installing it manually (require compilation/non native wheel) will bring its support.

Find a quick way to know if your environment is capable of emitting HTTP/3 requests by:

>>> from niquests import get

>>> r = get("https://1.1.1.1")
>>> r
<Response HTTP/2 [200]>
>>> r = get("https://1.1.1.1")
>>> r
<Response HTTP/3 [200]>

The underlying library natively understand the Alt-Svc header and is constantly looking for the h3 alternative service. Once it finds it, and is deemed valid, it opens up a QUIC connection to the target. It is saved in-memory by Niquests.

You may also run the following command python -m niquests.help to find out if you support HTTP/3. In 95 percents of the case, the answer is yes!

Multiplexed Connection

Starting from Niquests 3.2 you can issue concurrent requests without having multiple connections. It can leverage multiplexing when your remote peer support either HTTP/2, or HTTP/3.

The only thing you will ever have to do to get started is to specify multiplexed=True from within your Session constructor.

Any Response returned by get, post, put, etc… will be a lazy instance of Response.

Note

An important note about using Session(multiplexed=True) is that, in order to be efficient and actually leverage its perks, you will have to issue multiple concurrent request before actually trying to access any Response methods or attributes.

Example A) Emitting concurrent requests and loading them via Session.gather():

from niquests import Session
from time import time

s = Session(multiplexed=True)

before = time()
responses = []

responses.append(
  s.get("https://pie.dev/delay/3")
)

responses.append(
  s.get("https://pie.dev/delay/1")
)

s.gather()

print(f"waited {time() - before} second(s)")  # will print 3s

Example B) Emitting concurrent requests and loading them via direct access:

from niquests import Session
from time import time

s = Session(multiplexed=True)

before = time()
responses = []

responses.append(
  s.get("https://pie.dev/delay/3")
)

responses.append(
  s.get("https://pie.dev/delay/1")
)

# internally call gather with self (Response)
print(responses[0].status_code)  # 200! :! Hidden call to s.gather(responses[0])
print(responses[1].status_code)  # 200!

print(f"waited {time() - before} second(s)")  # will print 3s

The possible algorithms are actually nearly limitless, and you may arrange/write you own scheduling technics!

Warning

Beware that all in-flight (unresolved) lazy responses are lost immediately after closing the Session. Trying to access unresolved and lost responses will result in MultiplexingError exception being raised.

Session Gather

The Session instance expose a method called gather(*responses, max_fetch = None), you may call it to improve the efficiency of resolving your _lazy_ responses.

Here are the possible outcome of invocation:

s.gather()  # resolve all pending "lazy" responses
s.gather(resp)  # resolve given "resp" only
s.gather(max_fetch=2)  # resolve two responses (the first two that come)
s.gather(resp_a, resp_b, resp_c)  # resolve all three
s.gather(resp_a, resp_b, resp_c, max_fetch=1)  # only resolve the first one

Note

Call to s.gather is optional, you can access at will the responses properties and methods at any time.

Async session

You may have a program that require awaitable HTTP request. You are in luck as Niquests ships with an implementation of Session that support async.

All known methods remain the same at the sole difference that it return a coroutine.

Note

The underlying main library urllib3.future does not support native async but is thread safe. This is why we choose to implement / backport sync_to_async from Django that use a ThreadPool under the carpet.

Here is a basic example:

import asyncio
from niquests import AsyncSession, Response

async def fetch(url: str) -> Response:
    with AsyncSession() as s:
        return await s.get(url)

async def main() -> None:
    tasks = []

    for _ in range(10):
        tasks.append(asyncio.create_task(fetch("https://pie.dev/delay/1")))

    responses = await asyncio.gather(*tasks)

    print(responses)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

Warning

For the time being Niquests only support asyncio as the backend library for async. Contributions are welcomed if you want it to be compatible with anyio for example.

Note

Shortcut functions get, post, …, from the top-level package does not support async.

Async and Multiplex

You can leverage a multiplexed connection while in an async context! It’s the perfect solution while dealing with two or more hosts that support HTTP/2 onward.

Look at this basic sample:

import asyncio
from niquests import AsyncSession, Response

async def fetch(url: str) -> list[Response]:
    responses = []

    with AsyncSession(multiplexed=True) as s:
        for _ in range(10):
            responses.append(await s.get(url))

        await s.gather()

        return responses

async def main() -> None:
    tasks = []

    for _ in range(10):
        tasks.append(asyncio.create_task(fetch("https://pie.dev/delay/1")))

    responses_responses = await asyncio.gather(*tasks)
    responses = [item for sublist in responses_responses for item in sublist]

    print(responses)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

---

Ready for more? Check out the advanced section.