Welcome to clients’ documentation.

HTTP for humanitarians.

Quickstart

As great as requests is, typical usage is falling into some anti-patterns.

  • Being url-based, realistically all code needs to deal with url joining. Which tends to be redundant and suffer from leading or trailing slash issues.
  • The module level methods don’t take advantage of connection pooling, and require duplicate settings. Given the “100% automatic” documentation of connection reuse, it’s unclear how widely known this is.
  • Using Sessions requires assigning every setting individually, and still requires url joining.

Clients aim to be encourage best practices by making Sessions even easier to use than the module methods. Examples use the httpbin client testing service.

client = clients.Client(url, auth=('user', 'pass'), headers={'x-test': 'true'})
r = client.get('headers', headers={'x-test2': 'true'})
assert {'x-test', 'x-test2'} <= set(r.request.headers)

r = client.get('cookies', cookies={'from-my': 'browser'})
assert r.json() == {'cookies': {'from-my': 'browser'}}
r = client.get('cookies')
assert r.json() == {'cookies': {}}

client.get('cookies/set', params={'sessioncookie': '123456789'})
r = client.get('cookies')
assert r.json() == {'cookies': {'sessioncookie': '123456789'}}

Which reveals another anti-pattern regarding Responses. Although the response object is sometimes required, naturally the most common use case is to access the content. But the onus is on the caller to check the status_code and content-type.

Resources aim to making writing custom api clients or sdks easier. Their primary feature is to allow direct content access without silencing errors. Response content type is inferred from headers: json, content, or text.

resource = clients.Resource(url)
assert resource.get('get')['url'] == url + '/get'
with pytest.raises(IOError):
    resource.get('status/404')
assert '<html>' in resource.get('html')
assert isinstance(resource.get('bytes/10'), bytes)

Advanced Usage

Clients allow any base url, not just hosts, and consequently support path concatenation. Following the semantics of urljoin however, absolute paths and urls are treated as such. Hence there’s no need to parse a url retrieved from an api.

client = clients.Client(url)
cookies = client / 'cookies'
assert isinstance(cookies, clients.Client)
assert cookies.get().url == url + '/cookies'

assert cookies.get('/').url == url + '/'
assert cookies.get(url).url == url + '/'

Some api endpoints require trailing slashes; some forbid them. Set it and forget it.

client = clients.Client(url, trailing='/')
assert client.get('ip').status_code == 404

Note trailing isn’t limited to only being a slash. This can be useful for static paths below a parameter: api/v1/{query}.json.

Asyncio

Using httpx instead of requests, AsyncClients and AsyncResources implement the same interface, except the request methods return asyncio coroutines.

Avant-garde Usage

Resources support operator overloaded syntax wherever sensible. These interfaces often obviate the need for writing custom clients specific to an API.

  • __getattr__: alternate path concatenation
  • __getitem__: GET content
  • __setitem__: PUT json
  • __delitem__: DELETE
  • __contains__: HEAD ok
  • __iter__: GET streamed lines or content
  • __call__: GET with params
resource = clients.Resource(url)
assert set(resource['get']) == {'origin', 'headers', 'args', 'url'}
resource['put'] = {}
del resource['delete']

assert '200' in resource.status
assert '404' not in resource.status
assert [line['id'] for line in resource / 'stream/3'] == [0, 1, 2]
assert next(iter(resource / 'html')) == '<!DOCTYPE html>'
assert resource('cookies/set', name='value') == {'cookies': {'name': 'value'}}

Higher-level methods for common requests.

  • iter: __iter__ with args
  • update: PATCH with json params, or GET with conditional PUT
  • create: POST and return location
  • download: GET streamed content to file
  • authorize: acquire oauth token
resource = clients.Resource(url)
assert list(map(len, resource.iter('stream-bytes/256'))) == [128] * 2
assert resource.update('patch', name='value')['json'] == {'name': 'value'}
assert resource.create('post', {'name': 'value'}) is None
file = resource.download(io.BytesIO(), 'image/png')
assert file.tell()

A singleton decorator can be used on subclasses, conveniently creating a single custom instance.

@clients.singleton('http://localhost/')
class custom_api(clients.Resource):
    pass  # custom methods

assert isinstance(custom_api, clients.Resource)
assert custom_api.url == 'http://localhost/'

Remote and AsyncRemote clients default to POSTs with json bodies, for APIs which are more RPC than REST.

Graph and AsyncGraph remote clients execute GraphQL queries.

Proxy and AsyncProxy clients provide load-balancing across multiple hosts, with an extensible interface for different algorithms.

Indices and tables