The Python requests library – basics for network engineers
Do you want to automate with APIs? Here's an overview of the requests library and the basics of HTTP – for those coming from the networking world.
If you want to be a network engineer with programming muscles, you need to get comfortable with APIs. They make automation simple, clear, and structured – unlike CLIs where you have to sit and parse text with regex.
HTTP – the foundation
HTTP is the protocol everything is built upon. HTTP/1.1 is in RFC 2616, HTTP/2 in RFC 7540. Always use HTTPS – never unencrypted.
Common HTTP methods
- GET – retrieve data.
- POST – create a resource.
- PUT – create/update the entire resource.
- PATCH – update parts of the resource.
- DELETE – delete.
requests in practice
import requests r = requests.get("https://api.example.com/devices", auth=("user","pass"))r.raise_for_status()devices = r.json()Some tips:
- Use
Session()to reuse auth and headers. - Always set
timeout– nothing hangs forever. - Handle status codes because
raise_for_status()gives you a clear error chain.
Next steps
Once you are comfortable with requests: look at async with httpx for many parallel calls, and Pydantic for validating what comes back.
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