How to Capture HTTP Requests in Python Applications Using the Requests Library?

Inspecting HTTP Requests in Python Applications

Identifying the source of errors during API calls can be challenging, especially when the error response lacks specific details. To resolve such issues, API providers often require the entire HTTP request, including headers. This article presents a convenient approach for capturing these requests using the popular requests library.

Using Logging to Capture Requests

Recent versions of requests (1.x and above) offer a simple logging mechanism to capture HTTP requests. By enabling debugging at the http.client level, we can log both the request (including headers and body) and the response (including headers).

Implementation

The following code snippet demonstrates how to enable HTTP request logging:

import requests
import logging

# Enable debugging at http.client level
http_client.HTTPConnection.debuglevel = 1

# Initialize and configure logging
logging.basicConfig()
logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
requests_log = logging.getLogger("requests.packages.urllib3")
requests_log.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
requests_log.propagate = True

# Make an HTTP request
requests.get('https://httpbin.org/headers')

By executing this code, we enable request logging and store the logged data in the requests_log variable. We can then access the request headers and body from this variable as needed.

Example Output

The following is an example of the debug output generated by the logging mechanism:

send: 'GET /headers HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: httpbin.org\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, compress\r\nAccept: */*\r\nUser-Agent: python-requests/1.2.0 CPython/2.7.3 Linux/3.2.0-48-generic\r\n\r\n'

This output contains the entire HTTP request, including the HTTP method, URI, headers, and request body (if present). By providing this information to API providers, you can facilitate the identification and resolution of errors.

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