Advanced Usage¶
Customizing pool behavior
The PoolManager
class automatically handles creating ConnectionPool
instances for each host as needed. By default, it will keep a maximum of 10 ConnectionPool
instances. If you’re making requests to many different hosts it might improve performance to increase this number:
However, keep in mind that this does increase memory and socket consumption.
Similarly, the ConnectionPool
class keeps a pool of individual HTTPConnection
instances. These connections are used during an individual request and returned to the pool when the request is complete. By default only one connection will be saved for re-use. If you are making many requests to the same host simultaneously it might improve performance to increase this number:
The behavior of the pooling for ConnectionPool
is different from PoolManager
. By default, if a new request is made and there is no free connection in the pool then a new connection will be created. However, this connection will not be saved if more than maxsize
connections exist. This means that maxsize
does not determine the maximum number of connections that can be open to a particular host, just the maximum number of connections to keep in the pool. However, if you specify block=True
then there can be at most maxsize
connections open to a particular host:
Any new requests will block until a connection is available from the pool. This is a great way to prevent flooding a host with too many connections in multi-threaded applications.
Streaming and IO
When dealing with large responses it’s often better to stream the response content:
Setting preload_content
to False
means that urllib3 will stream the response content. stream()
lets you iterate over chunks of the response content.
Note
When using preload_content=False
, you should call release_conn()
to release the http connection back to the connection pool so that it can be re-used.
However, you can also treat the HTTPResponse
instance as a file-like object. This allows you to do buffering:
Calls to read()
will block until more response data is available.
You can use this file-like object to do things like decode the content using codecs
:
Proxies
You can use ProxyManager
to tunnel requests through an HTTP proxy:
The usage of ProxyManager
is the same as PoolManager
.
You can use SOCKSProxyManager
to connect to SOCKS4 or SOCKS5 proxies. In order to use SOCKS proxies you will need to install PySocks or install urllib3 with the socks
extra:
Once PySocks is installed, you can use SOCKSProxyManager
:
Custom SSL certificates and client certificates
Instead of using certifi you can provide your own certificate authority bundle. This is useful for cases where you’ve generated your own certificates or when you’re using a private certificate authority. Just provide the full path to the certificate bundle when creating a PoolManager
:
When you specify your own certificate bundle only requests that can be verified with that bundle will succeed. It’s recommended to use a separate PoolManager
to make requests to URLs that do not need the custom certificate.
You can also specify a client certificate. This is useful when both the server and the client need to verify each other’s identity. Typically these certificates are issued from the same authority. To use a client certificate, provide the full path when creating a PoolManager
:
Certificate validation and Mac OS X
Apple-provided Python and OpenSSL libraries contain a patches that make them automatically check the system keychain’s certificates. This can be surprising if you specify custom certificates and see requests unexpectedly succeed. For example, if you are specifying your own certificate for validation and the server presents a different certificate you would expect the connection to fail. However, if that server presents a certificate that is in the system keychain then the connection will succeed.
This article has more in-depth analysis and explanation.
SSL Warnings
urllib3 will issue several different warnings based on the level of certificate verification support. These warning indicate particular situations and can resolved in different ways.
-
- This happens when an request is made to an HTTPS URL without certificate verification enabled. Follow the certificate verification guide to resolve this warning.
InsecureRequestWarning
-
-
This happens on Python 2 platforms that have an outdated
ssl
module. These olderssl
modules can cause some insecure requests to succeed where they should fail and secure requests to fail where they should succeed. Follow the pyOpenSSL guide to resolve this warning.
InsecurePlatformWarning
-
This happens on Python 2 platforms that have an outdated
-
- This happens on Python 2 versions older than 2.7.9. These older versions lack SNI support. This can cause servers to present a certificate that the client thinks is invalid. Follow the pyOpenSSL guide to resolve this warning.
SNIMissingWarning
Making unverified HTTPS requests is strongly discouraged, however, if you understand the risks and wish to disable these warnings, you can use disable_warnings()
:
Alternatively you can capture the warnings with the standard logging
module:
Finally, you can suppress the warnings at the interpreter level by setting thePYTHONWARNINGS
environment variable or by using the -W flag.
Google App Engine
urllib3 supports Google App Engine with some caveats.
If you’re using the Flexible environment, you do not have to do any configuration- urllib3 will just work. However, if you’re using the Standard environment then you either have to use urllib3.contrib.appengine
’s AppEngineManager
or use the Sockets API
To use AppEngineManager
:
To use the Sockets API, add the following to your app.yaml and use PoolManager
as usual:
For more details on the limitations and gotchas, see urllib3.contrib.appengine
.