Skip to main content

A persistent cache for python requests

Project description

Build Codecov Documentation Code Shelter

PyPI Conda PyPI - Python Versions PyPI - Downloads

Summary

requests-cache is a persistent HTTP cache that provides an easy way to get better performance with the python requests library.

Complete project documentation can be found at requests-cache.readthedocs.io.

Features

  • 🍰 Ease of use: Keep using the requests library you're already familiar with. Add caching with a drop-in replacement for requests.Session, or install globally to add transparent caching to all requests functions.
  • 🚀 Performance: Get sub-millisecond response times for cached responses. When they expire, you still save time with conditional requests.
  • 💾 Persistence: Works with several storage backends including SQLite, Redis, MongoDB, and DynamoDB; or save responses as plain JSON files, YAML, and more
  • 🕗 Expiration: Use Cache-Control and other standard HTTP headers, define your own expiration schedule, keep your cache clutter-free with backends that natively support TTL, or any combination of strategies
  • ⚙️ Customization: Works out of the box with zero config, but with a robust set of features for configuring and extending the library to suit your needs
  • 🧩 Compatibility: Can be combined with other popular libraries based on requests

Quickstart

First, install with pip:

pip install requests-cache

Then, use requests_cache.CachedSession to make your requests. It behaves like a normal requests.Session, but with caching behavior.

To illustrate, we'll call an endpoint that adds a delay of 1 second, simulating a slow or rate-limited website.

This takes 1 minute:

import requests

session = requests.Session()
for i in range(60):
    session.get('https://httpbin.org/delay/1')

This takes 1 second:

import requests_cache

session = requests_cache.CachedSession('demo_cache')
for i in range(60):
    session.get('https://httpbin.org/delay/1')

With caching, the response will be fetched once, saved to demo_cache.sqlite, and subsequent requests will return the cached response near-instantly.

Patching

If you don't want to manage a session object, or just want to quickly test it out in your application without modifying any code, requests-cache can also be installed globally, and all requests will be transparently cached:

import requests
import requests_cache

requests_cache.install_cache('demo_cache')
requests.get('https://httpbin.org/delay/1')

Headers and Expiration

By default, requests-cache will keep cached responses indefinitely. In most cases, you will want to use one of the two following strategies to balance cache freshness and performance:

Define exactly how long to keep responses:

Use the expire_after parameter to set a fixed expiration time for all responses:

from requests_cache import CachedSession
from datetime import timedelta

# Keep responses for 360 seconds
session = CachedSession('demo_cache', expire_after=360)

# Or use timedelta objects to specify other units of time
session = CachedSession('demo_cache', expire_after=timedelta(hours=1))

See Expiration for more features and settings.

Use Cache-Control headers:

Use the cache_control parameter to enable automatic expiration based on Cache-Control and other standard HTTP headers sent by the server:

from requests_cache import CachedSession

session = CachedSession('demo_cache', cache_control=True)

See Cache Headers for more details.

Settings

The default settings work well for most use cases, but there are plenty of ways to customize caching behavior when needed. Here is a quick example of some of the options available:

from datetime import timedelta
from requests_cache import CachedSession

session = CachedSession(
    'demo_cache',
    use_cache_dir=True,                # Save files in the default user cache dir
    cache_control=True,                # Use Cache-Control response headers for expiration, if available
    expire_after=timedelta(days=1),    # Otherwise expire responses after one day
    allowable_codes=[200, 400],        # Cache 400 responses as a solemn reminder of your failures
    allowable_methods=['GET', 'POST'], # Cache whatever HTTP methods you want
    ignored_parameters=['api_key'],    # Don't match this request param, and redact if from the cache
    match_headers=['Accept-Language'], # Cache a different response per language
    stale_if_error=True,               # In case of request errors, use stale cache data if possible
)

Next Steps

To find out more about what you can do with requests-cache, see:

Project details


Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

requests_cache-1.0.0.tar.gz (2.9 MB view details)

Uploaded Source

Built Distribution

requests_cache-1.0.0-py3-none-any.whl (58.6 kB view details)

Uploaded Python 3

File details

Details for the file requests_cache-1.0.0.tar.gz.

File metadata

  • Download URL: requests_cache-1.0.0.tar.gz
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 2.9 MB
  • Tags: Source
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: poetry/1.4.0 CPython/3.11.2 Linux/5.15.0-1033-azure

File hashes

Hashes for requests_cache-1.0.0.tar.gz
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 162f591ed9ad0ea601cefd898770f499d473cb056466e85494299a1b0ca61cbf
MD5 0f20a10212e48b303d520d28709d9da5
BLAKE2b-256 ae362d19b9c2442cb73c4a9a3a9c2916cc1709077ed3f78d8c7270f9ae5273ca

See more details on using hashes here.

File details

Details for the file requests_cache-1.0.0-py3-none-any.whl.

File metadata

  • Download URL: requests_cache-1.0.0-py3-none-any.whl
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 58.6 kB
  • Tags: Python 3
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: poetry/1.4.0 CPython/3.11.2 Linux/5.15.0-1033-azure

File hashes

Hashes for requests_cache-1.0.0-py3-none-any.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 558e335bf1c0f42ecbcf1abb8e7c8e679845ee522d75d1c50b77d4fbf5434012
MD5 605e97ac73192c1bf879924779b3a4ec
BLAKE2b-256 0074dc9df8e0914b6d1261dd87e19a162888da0e0197d2db321f16f869298522

See more details on using hashes here.

Supported by

AWS AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Datadog Monitoring Fastly Fastly CDN Google Google Download Analytics Microsoft Microsoft PSF Sponsor Pingdom Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Sentry Error logging StatusPage StatusPage Status page