Requests Auth & Sessions

Python · Reference cheat sheet

📋 Overview

Reuse connections and credentials with requests.Session. Attach Basic/Bearer/token auth, cookies, and default headers once per client.

🔧 Core concepts

Piece	Role
`Session`	Pool + cookie jar + defaults
`auth=(user, pass)`	HTTP Basic
`headers["Authorization"]`	Bearer / API keys
`cookies=` / jar	Session cookies
`hooks`	Response callbacks

Theory: a Session is a stateful client. Prefer one Session per service in long-running processes; create short-lived Sessions in scripts with with.

💡 Examples

Bearer session:

import os
import requests

s = requests.Session()
s.headers.update({
    "Accept": "application/json",
    "Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['API_TOKEN']}",
})
r = s.get("https://api.example.com/v1/me", timeout=10)
r.raise_for_status()
print(r.json())

Login then reuse cookies:

with requests.Session() as s:
    s.post(
        "https://example.com/login",
        data={"username": "ada", "password": "x"},
        timeout=10,
    ).raise_for_status()
    dash = s.get("https://example.com/dashboard", timeout=10)
    print(dash.status_code)

Basic auth:

r = requests.get(
    "https://httpbin.org/basic-auth/ada/secret",
    auth=("ada", "secret"),
    timeout=10,
)
print(r.status_code)

⚠️ Pitfalls

Don't put secrets in query strings — use headers.
Sessions are not fork-safe — recreate after os.fork.
Update Authorization when tokens rotate.

📋 Overview

🔧 Core concepts

💡 Examples

⚠️ Pitfalls

🔗 Related

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