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

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Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/microsoft/debugpy/blob/HEAD/.claude/skills/requests/SKILL.md

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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.