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📡 Real-World

Python REST API Consumption – requests & httpx

Consuming REST APIs is daily Python work. requests makes HTTP simple; httpx adds async. Learn auth, pagination, retries, and error handling.

⏱️ 20 min read🎯 Real-World📅 Updated 2026

Basic HTTP Requests

Python
import requests

resp = requests.get("https://api.github.com/users/python")
resp.raise_for_status()
data = resp.json()
print(data["public_repos"])

new_post = {"title": "Hello", "body": "World", "userId": 1}
resp = requests.post(
    "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts",
    json=new_post,
    timeout=10
)
print(resp.status_code, resp.json())

Authentication

Python
# Bearer token
headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"}
resp = requests.get("https://api.example.com/data", headers=headers)

# Reuse session (faster, shares cookies)
session = requests.Session()
session.headers.update({"Authorization": f"Bearer {token}"})
resp = session.get("https://api.example.com/profile")

Pagination

Python
def fetch_all(url, headers=None):
    results, page = [], 1
    while True:
        resp = requests.get(url, params={"page": page, "per_page": 100}, headers=headers)
        resp.raise_for_status()
        data = resp.json()
        if not data:
            break
        results.extend(data)
        if "next" not in resp.links:
            break
        page += 1
    return results

Retries & Error Handling

Python
from requests.adapters import HTTPAdapter
from urllib3.util.retry import Retry

session = requests.Session()
retry = Retry(total=3, backoff_factor=1, status_forcelist=[429, 500, 502, 503])
session.mount("https://", HTTPAdapter(max_retries=retry))

try:
    resp = session.get("https://api.example.com/data", timeout=30)
    resp.raise_for_status()
    return resp.json()
except requests.exceptions.Timeout:
    print("Timed out")
except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as e:
    print(f"HTTP {e.response.status_code}")
Tip: Use httpx instead of requests for async code — nearly identical API but supports async/await.
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