requests-async

Brings support for async/await syntax to Python's fabulous requests library.

Requirements

• Python 3.6+

Installation

$ pip install requests-async

Usage

Just use the standard requests API, but use await for making requests.

Note: Use ipython to try this from the console, since it supports await.

import requests_async as requests


response = await requests.get('https://example.org')
print(response.status_code)
print(response.text)

Or use explicit sessions, with an async context manager.

import requests_async as requests


async with requests.Session() as session:
    response = await session.get('https://example.org')
    print(response.status_code)
    print(response.text)

The requests_async package subclasses requests, so you're getting all the standard behavior and API you'd expect.

Streaming responses & requests

The iter_content() and iter_lines() methods are async iterators.

response = await requests.get('https://example.org', stream=True)
async for chunk in response.iter_content():
    ...

The method signatures remain the same as the standard requests API:

• iter_content(chunk_size=1, decode_unicode=False)
• iter_lines(chunk_size=512, decode_unicode=False, delimiter=None)

The methods will yield text if decode_unicode is set and the response includes an encoding. Otherwise the methods will yield bytes.

You can also stream request bodies. To do this you should use an asynchronous generator that yields bytes.

async def stream_body():
    ...

response = await requests.post('https://example.org', data=stream_body())

Mock Requests

In some situations, such as when you're testing a web application, you may not want to make actual outgoing network requests, but would prefer instead to mock out the endpoints.

You can do this using the ASGISession, which allows you to plug into any ASGI application, instead of making actual network requests.

import requests_async

# Create a mock service, with Starlette, Responder, Quart, FastAPI, Bocadillo,
# or any other ASGI web framework.
mock_app = ...

if TESTING:
    # Issue requests to the mocked application.
    requests = requests_async.ASGISession(mock_app)
else:
    # Make live network requests.
    requests = requests_async.Session()

Test Client

You can also use ASGISession as a test client for any ASGI application.

You'll probably want to install pytest and pytest-asyncio, or something equivalent, to allow you to write async test cases.

from requests_async import ASGISession
from myproject import app
import pytest

@pytest.mark.asyncio
async def test_homepage():
    client = ASGISession(app)
    response = await client.get("/")
    assert response.status_code == 200

Alternatives

• The http3 package both sync and async HTTP clients, with a requests-compatible API.
• The aiohttp package provides an alternative client for making async HTTP requests.