python requests ssl

Python Requests SSL

If you are working with web applications that require secure communication, then you need to use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption. SSL is a protocol for encrypting data sent between web servers and clients, such as browsers. Python Requests is a popular library for making HTTP requests in Python, and it supports SSL by default.

Using SSL with Requests

When you make a request using the Requests library, it automatically verifies the SSL certificate of the server you are communicating with. If the certificate is invalid or expired, Requests will raise an exception. You can disable SSL verification by passing the verify=False parameter to the requests.get() method. However, this is not recommended as it can leave your application vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.


import requests

response = requests.get('https://www.example.com', verify=True)
print(response.content)
    

In the example above, we are making a GET request to the example.com website using SSL verification. The verify parameter is set to True, which means that Requests will check the validity of the SSL certificate. If the SSL certificate is invalid or expired, Requests will raise a requests.exceptions.SSLError exception.

Disabling SSL Verification

If you need to disable SSL verification for some reason, you can pass verify=False to the requests.get() method:


import requests

response = requests.get('https://www.example.com', verify=False)
print(response.content)
    

This will disable SSL verification and allow you to communicate with servers that have invalid or self-signed certificates. However, as stated earlier, this is not recommended as it can leave your application vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.