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python requests certificate

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

Python Requests Certificate

Python Requests is an HTTP library that enables you to send HTTP/1.1 requests quickly and easily. It is built on top of the urllib3 library, which is a powerful HTTP client that supports SSL/TLS verification. However, there are instances when you'll need to specify a certificate.

What is an SSL/TLS certificate?

An SSL/TLS certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates the identity of a website and encrypts the data sent between the website and the user's browser. This certificate is issued by a Certificate Authority (CA), and it contains information about the website's domain name, company name, and public key.

How to use a certificate with Python Requests?

There are two ways to use a certificate with Python Requests:

  • Passing a path to the certificate file
  • Passing the certificate data directly

Passing a path to the certificate file

To use a certificate with Python Requests, you need to specify the path to the certificate file in your request. You can do this by passing the path to the verify parameter. Here's an example:


import requests

url = 'https://www.example.com'
cert_file = '/path/to/certfile.pem'

response = requests.get(url, verify=cert_file)

In the above example, we're passing the path to the certfile.pem file using the verify parameter. Requests will use this file to verify the SSL/TLS certificate of the website.

Passing the certificate data directly

If you have the certificate data in memory, you can pass it directly to the verify parameter. Here's an example:


import requests

url = 'https://www.example.com'
cert_data = open('/path/to/certfile.pem').read()

response = requests.get(url, verify=cert_data)

In the above example, we're reading the contents of the certfile.pem file and passing it to the verify parameter. Requests will use this data to verify the SSL/TLS certificate of the website.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed how to use a certificate with Python Requests. We saw that there are two ways to specify a certificate: by passing the path to the certificate file or by passing the certificate data directly. We hope this helps you in your future Python Requests projects!

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