Skill: Requests

Best practices for HTTP client usage with Requests including sessions, error handling, and timeouts.

When to Use

Apply this skill when making HTTP requests with the Requests library — sessions, auth, error handling, retries, and file uploads.

Sessions

• Use requests.Session() for connection pooling and persistent headers/cookies across multiple requests.
• Configure session.headers for default auth tokens and user-agent strings.
• Use session.mount() with HTTPAdapter for retry logic.

Error Handling

• Always call response.raise_for_status() to surface HTTP errors as exceptions.
• Always set timeout=(connect_timeout, read_timeout) — never use infinite timeouts.
• Handle requests.ConnectionError, requests.Timeout, and requests.HTTPError explicitly.