requests

Skill: Requests

Best practices for HTTP client usage with Requests including sessions, error handling, and timeouts.

When to Use

Apply this skill when making HTTP requests with the Requests library — sessions, auth, error handling, retries, and file uploads.

Sessions

• Use requests.Session() for connection pooling and persistent headers/cookies across multiple requests.
• Configure session.headers for default auth tokens and user-agent strings.
• Use session.mount() with HTTPAdapter for retry logic.

Error Handling

• Always call response.raise_for_status() to surface HTTP errors as exceptions.
• Always set timeout=(connect_timeout, read_timeout) — never use infinite timeouts.
• Handle requests.ConnectionError, requests.Timeout, and requests.HTTPError explicitly.

Retries

• Use urllib3.util.Retry with HTTPAdapter for automatic retries with backoff.
• Configure status-based retries for transient errors (429, 500, 502, 503, 504).

Security

• Never disable SSL verification (verify=False) in production.
• Pass credentials via environment variables, not hardcoded strings.
• Use auth= parameter for HTTP auth rather than manually setting headers.

Pitfalls

• Don't forget timeouts — they default to None (infinite wait).
• Don't use requests.get() for high-throughput — use sessions.
• Close responses from streaming requests (stream=True) to release connections.