User guide

Installation

Install with pip or easy_install:

pip install --upgrade requests-cache

or download latest version from version control:

git clone git://github.com/reclosedev/requests-cache.git
cd requests-cache
python setup.py install

Warning

Version updates of requests, urllib3 or requests_cache itself can break existing cache database (see https://github.com/reclosedev/requests-cache/issues/56 ). So if your code relies on cache, or is expensive in terms of time and traffic, please be sure to use something like virtualenv and pin your requirements.

Usage

There is two ways of using requests_cache:

• Using CachedSession instead requests.Session
• Monkey patching requests to use CachedSession by default

Monkey-patching allows to add caching to existent program by adding just two lines:

Import requests_cache and call install_cache()

import requests
import requests_cache

requests_cache.install_cache()

And you can use requests, all responses will be cached transparently!

For example, following code will take only 1-2 seconds instead 10:

for i in range(10):
    requests.get('http://httpbin.org/delay/1')

Cache can be configured with some options, such as cache filename, backend (sqlite, mongodb, redis, memory), expiration time, etc. E.g. cache stored in sqlite database (default format) named 'test_cache.sqlite' with expiration set to 300 seconds can be configured as:

requests_cache.install_cache('test_cache', backend='sqlite', expire_after=300)

See also

Full list of options can be found in requests_cache.install_cache() reference

Transparent caching is achieved by monkey-patching requests library It is possible to uninstall this patch with requests_cache.uninstall_cache().

Also, you can use requests_cache.disabled() context manager for temporary disabling caching:

with requests_cache.disabled():
    print(requests.get('http://httpbin.org/ip').text)

If Response is taken from cache, from_cache attribute will be True:

>>> import requests
>>> import requests_cache
>>> requests_cache.install_cache()
>>> requests_cache.clear()
>>> r = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/get')
>>> r.from_cache
False
>>> r = requests.get('http://httpbin.org/get')
>>> r.from_cache
True

It can be used, for example, for request throttling with help of requests hook system:

import time
import requests
import requests_cache

def make_throttle_hook(timeout=1.0):
    """
    Returns a response hook function which sleeps for `timeout` seconds if
    response is not cached
    """
    def hook(response, *args, **kwargs):
        if not getattr(response, 'from_cache', False):
            print('sleeping')
            time.sleep(timeout)
        return response
    return hook

if __name__ == '__main__':
    requests_cache.install_cache('wait_test')
    requests_cache.clear()

    s = requests_cache.CachedSession()
    s.hooks = {'response': make_throttle_hook(0.1)}
    s.get('http://httpbin.org/delay/get')
    s.get('http://httpbin.org/delay/get')

See also

example.py

Note

requests_cache prefetchs response content, be aware if your code uses streaming requests.

Persistence

requests_cache designed to support different backends for persistent storage. By default it uses sqlite database. Type of storage can be selected with backend argument of install_cache().

List of available backends:

• 'sqlite' - sqlite database (default)
• 'memory' - not persistent, stores all data in Python dict in memory
• 'mongodb' - (experimental) MongoDB database (pymongo < 3.0 required)
• 'redis' - stores all data on a redis data store (redis required)

You can write your own and pass instance to install_cache() or CachedSession constructor. See Cache backends API documentation and sources.

Expiration

If you are using cache with expire_after parameter set, responses are removed from the storage only when the same request is made. Since the store sizes can get out of control pretty quickly with expired items you can remove them using remove_expired_responses() or BaseCache.remove_old_entries(created_before).

expire_after = timedelta(hours=1)
requests_cache.install_cache(expire_after=expire_after)
...
requests_cache.remove_expired_responses()
# or
remove_old_entries.get_cache().remove_old_entries(datetime.utcnow() - expire_after)
# when used as session
session = CachedSession(..., expire_after=expire_after)
...
session.cache.remove_old_entries(datetime.utcnow() - expire_after)

For more information see API reference.