4.1. Basic Authentication

Many web services that require authentication accept HTTP Basic Auth. This is the simplest kind, and Requests supports it straight out of the box.

Making requests with HTTP Basic Auth is very simple:

>>> from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth
>>> requests.get('https://api.github.com/user', auth=HTTPBasicAuth('user', 'pass'))
<Response [200]>

In fact, HTTP Basic Auth is so common that Requests provides a handy shorthand for using it:

>>> requests.get('https://api.github.com/user', auth=('user', 'pass'))
<Response [200]>

Providing the credentials in a tuple like this is exactly the same as the HTTPBasicAuth example above.

4.1.1. netrc Authentication

If no authentication method is given with the auth argument, Requests will attempt to get the authentication credentials for the URL’s hostname from the user’s netrc file. The netrc file overrides raw HTTP authentication headers set with headers=.

If credentials for the hostname are found, the request is sent with HTTP Basic Auth.