Do I need urllib3?

Python provides several modules for making HTTP requests, with the main ones being the built-in urllib module and the popular third-party requests library. But there's another option that fills an important niche - urllib3. Here's when urllib3 can be useful.

urllib3 focuses specifically on the underlying HTTP connection - it handles all the socket level logic and TLS encryption. This allows it to provide useful capabilities like:

Connection pooling and reuse

File uploads with proper encoding

Thread safety and support for asynchronous requests

Automatic redirection

Proxy support

Here's a quick example of making a GET request with urllib3:

import urllib3

http = urllib3.PoolManager()
r = http.request('GET', 'http://example.com')
print(r.data)

So when would you use urllib3 instead of urllib or requests?

If you need full control over the HTTP connection handling and want to manage things like redirection and retries yourself.

When making lots of requests in parallel - urllib3's connection pooling shines here.

In asynchronous applications - urllib3 supports async with aiohttp and Tornado.

If you want to wrap and extend the requests module - urllib3 is what requests is built on!

The main downsides are that urllib3 has a lower-level API and you lose some conveniences of requests like automatic JSON decoding. It also does not have authentication or session support built-in.

So in summary, consider using urllib3:

If you want connection pooling and better performance for many requests.

When using asyncio or writing asynchronous code.

If you want to handle redirects, retries and TLS manually.

As a foundation for building on top of requests.

For most basic API clients, requests tends to be the best choice. But for large scraping or crawling projects or advanced use cases, take a look at urllib3!

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Do I need urllib3?

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