Python requests – print entire http request (raw)?

Note: this answer is for older versions of requests, when this functionality was missing. Newer versions support this natively (see other answers)

It’s not possible to get the true raw content of the request out of requests, since it only deals with higher level objects, such as headers and method type. requests uses urllib3 to send requests, but urllib3 also doesn’t deal with raw data – it uses httplib. Here’s a representative stack trace of a request:

-> r= requests.get("http://google.com")
  /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/api.py(55)get()
-> return request('get', url, **kwargs)
  /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/api.py(44)request()
-> return session.request(method=method, url=url, **kwargs)
  /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/sessions.py(382)request()
-> resp = self.send(prep, **send_kwargs)
  /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/sessions.py(485)send()
-> r = adapter.send(request, **kwargs)
  /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/adapters.py(324)send()
-> timeout=timeout
  /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/packages/urllib3/connectionpool.py(478)urlopen()
-> body=body, headers=headers)
  /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/packages/urllib3/connectionpool.py(285)_make_request()
-> conn.request(method, url, **httplib_request_kw)
  /usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py(958)request()
-> self._send_request(method, url, body, headers)

Inside the httplib machinery, we can see HTTPConnection._send_request indirectly uses HTTPConnection._send_output, which finally creates the raw request and body (if it exists), and uses HTTPConnection.send to send them separately. send finally reaches the socket.

Since there’s no hooks for doing what you want, as a last resort you can monkey patch httplib to get the content. It’s a fragile solution, and you may need to adapt it if httplib is changed. If you intend to distribute software using this solution, you may want to consider packaging httplib instead of using the system’s, which is easy, since it’s a pure python module.

Alas, without further ado, the solution:

import requests
import httplib

def patch_send():
    old_send= httplib.HTTPConnection.send
    def new_send( self, data ):
        print data
        return old_send(self, data) #return is not necessary, but never hurts, in case the library is changed
    httplib.HTTPConnection.send= new_send

patch_send()
requests.get("http://www.python.org")

which yields the output:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.python.org
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, compress
Accept: */*
User-Agent: python-requests/2.1.0 CPython/2.7.3 Linux/3.2.0-23-generic-pae

Here is a code, which makes the same, but with response headers:

import socket
def patch_requests():
    old_readline = socket._fileobject.readline
    if not hasattr(old_readline, 'patched'):
        def new_readline(self, size=-1):
            res = old_readline(self, size)
            print res,
            return res
        new_readline.patched = True
        socket._fileobject.readline = new_readline
patch_requests()

I spent a lot of time searching for this, so I’m leaving it here, if someone needs.

An even better idea is to use the requests_toolbelt library, which can dump out both requests and responses as strings for you to print to the console. It handles all the tricky cases with files and encodings which the above solution does not handle well.

It’s as easy as this:

import requests
from requests_toolbelt.utils import dump

resp = requests.get('https://httpbin.org/redirect/5')
data = dump.dump_all(resp)
print(data.decode('utf-8'))

Source: https://toolbelt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/dumputils.html

You can simply install it by typing:

pip install requests_toolbelt

import requests

response = requests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', data={'key1': 'value1'})
print(response.request.url)
print(response.request.body)
print(response.request.headers)

Response objects have a .request property which is the PreparedRequest object that was sent.

I use the following function to format requests. It’s like @AntonioHerraizS except it will pretty-print JSON objects in the body as well, and it labels all parts of the request.

format_json = functools.partial(json.dumps, indent=2, sort_keys=True)
indent = functools.partial(textwrap.indent, prefix='  ')

def format_prepared_request(req):
    """Pretty-format 'requests.PreparedRequest'

    Example:
        res = requests.post(...)
        print(format_prepared_request(res.request))

        req = requests.Request(...)
        req = req.prepare()
        print(format_prepared_request(res.request))
    """
    headers = 'n'.join(f'{k}: {v}' for k, v in req.headers.items())
    content_type = req.headers.get('Content-Type', '')
    if 'application/json' in content_type:
        try:
            body = format_json(json.loads(req.body))
        except json.JSONDecodeError:
            body = req.body
    else:
        body = req.body
    s = textwrap.dedent("""
    REQUEST
    =======
    endpoint: {method} {url}
    headers:
    {headers}
    body:
    {body}
    =======
    """).strip()
    s = s.format(
        method=req.method,
        url=req.url,
        headers=indent(headers),
        body=indent(body),
    )
    return s

And I have a similar function to format the response:

def format_response(resp):
    """Pretty-format 'requests.Response'"""
    headers = 'n'.join(f'{k}: {v}' for k, v in resp.headers.items())
    content_type = resp.headers.get('Content-Type', '')
    if 'application/json' in content_type:
        try:
            body = format_json(resp.json())
        except json.JSONDecodeError:
            body = resp.text
    else:
        body = resp.text
    s = textwrap.dedent("""
    RESPONSE
    ========
    status_code: {status_code}
    headers:
    {headers}
    body:
    {body}
    ========
    """).strip()

    s = s.format(
        status_code=resp.status_code,
        headers=indent(headers),
        body=indent(body),
    )
    return s

requests supports so called event hooks (as of 2.23 there’s actually only response hook). The hook can be used on a request to print full request-response pair’s data, including effective URL, headers and bodies, like:

import textwrap
import requests

def print_roundtrip(response, *args, **kwargs):
    format_headers = lambda d: 'n'.join(f'{k}: {v}' for k, v in d.items())
    print(textwrap.dedent('''
        ---------------- request ----------------
        {req.method} {req.url}
        {reqhdrs}

        {req.body}
        ---------------- response ----------------
        {res.status_code} {res.reason} {res.url}
        {reshdrs}

        {res.text}
    ''').format(
        req=response.request, 
        res=response, 
        reqhdrs=format_headers(response.request.headers), 
        reshdrs=format_headers(response.headers), 
    ))

requests.get('https://httpbin.org/', hooks={'response': print_roundtrip})

Running it prints:

---------------- request ----------------
GET https://httpbin.org/
User-Agent: python-requests/2.23.0
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept: */*
Connection: keep-alive

None
---------------- response ----------------
200 OK https://httpbin.org/
Date: Thu, 14 May 2020 17:16:13 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 9593
Connection: keep-alive
Server: gunicorn/19.9.0
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
...
</html>

You may want to change res.text to res.content if the response is binary.

test_print.py content:

import logging
import pytest
import requests
from requests_toolbelt.utils import dump


def print_raw_http(response):
    data = dump.dump_all(response, request_prefix=b'', response_prefix=b'')
    return 'n' * 2 + data.decode('utf-8')

@pytest.fixture
def logger():
    log = logging.getLogger()
    log.addHandler(logging.StreamHandler())
    log.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
    return log

def test_print_response(logger):
    session = requests.Session()
    response = session.get('http://127.0.0.1:5000/')
    assert response.status_code == 300, logger.warning(print_raw_http(response))

hello.py content:

from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def hello_world():
    return 'Hello, World!'

Run:

 $ python -m flask hello.py
 $ python -m pytest test_print.py

Stdout:

------------------------------ Captured log call ------------------------------
DEBUG    urllib3.connectionpool:connectionpool.py:225 Starting new HTTP connection (1): 127.0.0.1:5000
DEBUG    urllib3.connectionpool:connectionpool.py:437 http://127.0.0.1:5000 "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 13
WARNING  root:test_print_raw_response.py:25 

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1:5000
User-Agent: python-requests/2.23.0
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept: */*
Connection: keep-alive


HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 13
Server: Werkzeug/1.0.1 Python/3.6.8
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2020 21:00:54 GMT

Hello, World!

A fork of @AntonioHerraizS answer (HTTP version missing as stated in comments)

Use this code to get a string representing the raw HTTP packet without sending it:

import requests


def get_raw_request(request):
    request = request.prepare() if isinstance(request, requests.Request) else request
    headers = 'rn'.join(f'{k}: {v}' for k, v in request.headers.items())
    body = '' if request.body is None else request.body.decode() if isinstance(request.body, bytes) else request.body
    return f'{request.method} {request.path_url} HTTP/1.1rn{headers}rnrn{body}'


headers = {'User-Agent': 'Test'}
request = requests.Request('POST', 'https://stackoverflow.com', headers=headers, json={"hello": "world"})
raw_request = get_raw_request(request)
print(raw_request)

Result:

POST / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Test
Content-Length: 18
Content-Type: application/json

{"hello": "world"}

Can also print the request in the response object

r = requests.get('https://stackoverflow.com')
raw_request = get_raw_request(r.request)
print(raw_request)