notrequests 0.6
Like Requests, but using urllib2.
License: MIT

Notrequests
===========

A Python wrapper for the built-in urllib2 module. The API is compatible with [the excellent Requests library][requests], but omitting features such as sessions and support for keep-alive.

Notrequests is intended for doing HTTP requests on [Google App Engine][gae] where Requests has some disadvantages.

It is not Python 3 compatible (yet).


Installation
------------

From PyPI:

    $ pip install notrequests

Or download and run setup as normal:

    $ curl -L -o notrequests.zip https://github.com/davidwtbuxton/notrequests/archive/master.zip
    $ unzip notrequests.zip
    $ cd notrequests-master
    $ python setup.py install


Usage
-----


### Basic usage

Notrequests is compatible with the Requests API (or it tries to be).

    >>> import notrequests
    >>>
    >>> response = notrequests.get('http://httpbin.org/get')
    >>> response.status_code == notrequests.codes.ok
    True

But it doesn't do everything that Requests does. There's no session support, no keep-alive support and it reads the entire response into memory.

The response body is available as a byte string or as unicode.

    >>> response = notrequests.get('http://httpbin.org/encoding/utf8')
    >>> response.headers['content-type']
    'text/html; charset=utf-8'
    >>> type(response.content)
    <type 'str'>
    >>> type(response.text)
    <type 'unicode'>

Decoding to unicode relies on the server having sent a valid content-type header. This is different to Requests because Requests has smarts to sniff the encoding should the response not include a content-type header.

Notrequests uses urllib2 but behaves more like Requests. So it won't throw an exception on 4xx and 5xx responses.

    >>> response = notrequests.get('http://httpbin.org/status/404')
    >>> response.status_code == notrequests.codes.not_found
    True

You can also test for failure, or raise an exception.

    >>> response = notrequests.get('http://httpbin.org/status/200')
    >>> response.ok
    True
    >>> response.raise_for_status()
    >>> response = notrequests.get('http://httpbin.org/status/404')
    >>> response.ok
    False
    >>> response.raise_for_status()
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      ...
    notrequests.HTTPError: Error 404 for http://httpbin.org/status/404


### Redirects

If you want to prevent Notrequests following a redirect response, you can use the `allow_redirects` keyword:

    >>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/redirect/1'
    >>> response = notrequests.get(url)
    >>> response.status_code
    200
    >>> response = notrequests.get(url, allow_redirects=False)
    >>> response.status_code
    302

On Google App Engine, the `X-Appengine-Inbound-Appid` header will only be set if [the sending application doesn't allow redirects!][appidentity]


### Authentication

You can do basic auth just like Requests (but not other authentication types):

    >>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/basic-auth/alice/secret'
    >>> response = notrequests.get(url)
    >>> response.status_code
    401
    >>> response = notrequests.get(url, auth=('alice', 'secret'))
    >>> response.status_code
    200


### JSON

And send and decode JSON:

    >>> import pprint
    >>> response = notrequests.put('http://httpbin.org/put', json={'foo': ['bar', 'baz']})
    >>> data = response.json()
    >>> pprint.pprint(data)
    {u'args': {},
     u'data': u'{"foo": ["bar", "baz"]}',
     u'files': {},
     u'form': {},
     u'headers': {u'Accept-Encoding': u'identity',
                  u'Content-Length': u'23',
                  u'Content-Type': u'application/json',
                  u'Host': u'httpbin.org',
                  u'User-Agent': u'notrequests/0.1'},
     u'json': {u'foo': [u'bar', u'baz']},
     u'origin': u'10.10.10.1',
     u'url': u'http://httpbin.org/put'}


### Accessing link headers

If the server sent 'Link' headers in the response (often used by APIs to give links to the next page of results) then you can get the parsed links straight from the response object:

    >>> response.headers['Link']
    '<https://example.com/?page=2>; rel="next"'
    >>> response.links['next']['url']
    'https://example.com/?page=2'


### Uploading files

There's also support for uploading files:

    >>> import io
    >>> fileobj = io.BytesIO('foo bar baz')
    >>> response = notrequests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', files={'upload': fileobj})
    >>> response.json()['files']
    {u'upload': 'foo bar baz'}

As with Requests, the keys in the files dict are the form field input names and
the values in the files dict can be a 2-tuple of file name with file object or
byte string:

    >>> files = {'upload': ('my-file.txt', b'Foo\nbar\nbaz.')}
    >>> response = notrequests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', files=files)
    >>> print response.request.data
    --10.10.10.1.503.2717.1443987498.810.2
    Content-Disposition: file; name="upload"; filename="my-file.txt"
    Content-Type: text/plain

    Foo
    bar
    baz.
    --10.10.10.1.503.2717.1443987498.810.2--


### Disabling SSL certificate checking

Use the `verify` keyword to disable SSL certificate checks. The default is `verify=True`, so Notrequests will raise `ssl.CertificateError` if the certificate does not match the server's hostname.

    >>> response = notrequests.get('https://swupdl.adobe.com', verify=False)

Notrequests does not support specifying alternate CA bundles.


API compatibility
-----------------

These are some features of [the Requests API][api] that Notrequests has _not_ implemented. It isn't a complete list, and it would be nice to have better support.

- Sessions
- Response.history
- Streaming uploads / downloads and iterating over data
- Alternate names for status codes
- Proxies


Tests
-----

Run the tests with [tox][tox].

By default the tests make requests to http://httpbin.org, but you can run a local instance which will speed things up.

    $ pip install httpbin gunicorn
    $ gunicorn --bind 127.0.0.1:8888 httpbin:app
    $ export NOTREQUESTS_TEST_URL="http://127.0.0.1:8888"
    $ tox


Why not use Requests?
---------------------

Google App Engine patches httplib in the standard library to use its urlfetch service, and restricts [the sockets API][sockets] to paid applications. Requests does not use httplib and uses sockets.

If you want to use [the app identity service to authenticate connections between App Engine applications][appidentity] you have to use the urlfetch service, you cannot use Requests. Notrequests works because it uses urllib2, which uses httplib.


[requests]: http://www.python-requests.org/
[gae]: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/
[tox]: http://codespeak.net/tox/
[appidentity]: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/appidentity/#Python_Asserting_identity_to_other_App_Engine_apps
[sockets]: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/sockets/
[api]: http://requests.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api/