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