Requests-Cache

Summary

requests-cache is a transparent, persistent HTTP cache for the python requests library. It‘s a convenient tool to use with web scraping, consuming REST APIs, slow or rate-limited sites, or any other scenario in which you’re making lots of requests that are expensive and/or likely to be sent more than once.

See full project documentation at: https://requests-cache.readthedocs.io

Features

• Ease of use: Use as a drop-in replacement for requests.Session, or install globally to add caching to all requests functions
• Customization: Works out of the box with zero config, but with plenty of options available for customizing cache expiration and other behavior
• Persistence: Includes several storage backends: SQLite, Redis, MongoDB, GridFS, DynamoDB, and filesystem.
• Compatibility: Can be used alongside other popular libraries based on requests

Quickstart

First, install with pip:

pip install requests-cache

Next, use requests_cache.CachedSession to send and cache requests. To quickly demonstrate how to use it:

This takes ~1 minute:

import requests

session = requests.Session()
for i in range(60):
    session.get('http://httpbin.org/delay/1')

This takes ~1 second:

import requests_cache

session = requests_cache.CachedSession('demo_cache')
for i in range(60):
    session.get('http://httpbin.org/delay/1')

The URL in this example adds a delay of 1 second, simulating a slow or rate-limited website. With caching, the response will be fetched once, saved to demo_cache.sqlite, and subsequent requests will return the cached response near-instantly.

If you don't want to manage a session object, requests-cache can also be installed globally:

requests_cache.install_cache('demo_cache')
requests.get('http://httpbin.org/delay/1')

Next Steps

To find out more about what you can do with requests-cache, see:

• The User Guide and Advanced Usage sections
• A working example at Real Python: Caching External API Requests
• More examples in the examples/ folder