Building an HTTP client with requests

Being able to interact with RESTful APIs based on HTTP is an increasingly common task in projects in any programming language. In Python, we also have the option of interacting with a REST API in a simple way with the requests module. In this section, we will review the different ways in which we can interact with an HTTP-based API using the Python requests package.

One of the best options within the Python ecosystem for making HTTP requests is the requests module. You can install the requests library in your system in a straightforward manner with the pip command:

$ pip install requests

To test the library in our script, just import it as we do with other modules. Basically, requests is a wrapper of urllib.request, along with other Python modules, to provide the REST structure with simple methods, so we have the get, post, put, update, delete, head, and options methods, which are all the requisite methods for interacting with a RESTful...