Does Python requests use urllib3?

The Python requests library is one of the most popular ways to make HTTP requests in Python. Under the hood, requests relies on urllib3 to handle many aspects of making HTTP requests and handling responses. So what exactly is the relationship between requests and urllib3?

Requests is a Wrapper Around urllib3

The requests library provides an elegant, simple API for making HTTP requests in Python. When you call methods like requests.get() or requests.post(), requests handles:

But under the hood, requests delegates the actual network request and response handling to urllib3. So urllib3 handles:

So in essence, requests provides a nice high-level interface, while urllib3 handles the low-level details of making network requests. requests wraps urllib3 to make it simpler to work with.

Why Use Requests Instead of urllib3 Directly?

Since requests builds on top of urllib3, why not just use urllib3 directly? There are a few reasons:

So in most cases, requests is the best choice for making HTTP requests. But urllib3 is still useful for advanced, low-level use cases.

Key Takeaways

So in summary, requests builds on urllib3 to provide a great high-level interface for making HTTP requests in Python.