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python requests cache control

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

Python Requests Cache Control

Have you ever experienced a slow response from an API endpoint that you frequently call? One way to improve the performance of your Python application is to use caching. Caching is the process of storing the response from an API endpoint in a local cache, so that subsequent requests can fetch the response from the cache instead of making a new request to the server.

How to Control Cache in Python Requests?

In Python Requests, you can control caching by setting the cache-control header in your requests. The cache-control header is used by the server to specify caching rules for the response. There are several values that can be set in cache-control header.

Public Cache Control

If you want the response to be cached by both public and private caches, you can set the cache-control header to public.


import requests

url = 'https://api.example.com/data'
headers = {'cache-control': 'public'}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

Private Cache Control

If you want the response to be cached by private caches only, you can set the cache-control header to private.


import requests

url = 'https://api.example.com/data'
headers = {'cache-control': 'private'}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

No Cache Control

If you want to disable caching for the response, you can set the cache-control header to no-cache.


import requests

url = 'https://api.example.com/data'
headers = {'cache-control': 'no-cache'}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

Max Age Control

If you want to set a maximum age for the cached response, you can set the max-age parameter in the cache-control header. The value of max-age is in seconds.


import requests

url = 'https://api.example.com/data'
headers = {'cache-control': 'max-age=3600'}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

Combining Cache Control Parameters

You can combine multiple cache control parameters in the cache-control header. For example, if you want to set a maximum age of 3600 seconds and allow caching by both public and private caches, you can set the header to:


import requests

url = 'https://api.example.com/data'
headers = {'cache-control': 'public, max-age=3600'}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to control cache in Python Requests using the cache-control header. By setting the appropriate cache control parameters, you can improve the performance of your Python application by reducing the number of requests made to the server.

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