Using the Requests python library in Google App Engine

Question

I'm trying to use the awesome Requests library on Google App Engine. I found a patch for urllib3, which requests relies on, that is compatible with App Engine. https://github.com/shazow/urllib3/issues/61

I can successfully

import requests

but then

response = requests.get('someurl')

fails with the following traceback. What's going on?

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Applications/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/GoogleAppEngine-default.bundle/Contents/Resources/google_appengine/google/appengine/ext/admin/__init__.py", line 317, in post
    exec(compiled_code, globals())
  File "<string>", line 6, in <module>
  File "/Users/Rohan/Dropbox/MuktiTechnologiesINC/MuktiTechnologies/GAE/humanmictweet/GAE/libraries/requests/api.py", line 52, in get
    return request('get', url, **kwargs)
  File "/Users/Rohan/Dropbox/MuktiTechnologiesINC/MuktiTechnologies/GAE/humanmictweet/GAE/libraries/requests/api.py", line 40, in request
    return s.request(method=method, url=url, **kwargs)
  File "/Users/Rohan/Dropbox/MuktiTechnologiesINC/MuktiTechnologies/GAE/humanmictweet/GAE/libraries/requests/sessions.py", line 208, in request
    r.send(prefetch=prefetch)
  File "/Users/Rohan/Dropbox/MuktiTechnologiesINC/MuktiTechnologies/GAE/humanmictweet/GAE/libraries/requests/models.py", line 458, in send
    self.auth = get_netrc_auth(url)
  File "/Users/Rohan/Dropbox/MuktiTechnologiesINC/MuktiTechnologies/GAE/humanmictweet/GAE/libraries/requests/utils.py", line 43, in get_netrc_auth
    for loc in locations:
  File "/Users/Rohan/Dropbox/MuktiTechnologiesINC/MuktiTechnologies/GAE/humanmictweet/GAE/libraries/requests/utils.py", line 40, in <genexpr>
    locations = (os.path.expanduser('~/{0}'.format(f)) for f in NETRC_FILES)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/posixpath.py", line 260, in expanduser
    userhome = pwd.getpwuid(os.getuid()).pw_dir
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'getuid'

Answer 1

As mentioned, master branch of standalone urllib3 supposedly supports AppEngine now (I'll do a proper PyPI release once someone confirms this fact), but Requests does not yet support AppEngine since it makes assumption about various filesystem things to load configuration files which don't exist on AppEngine. Specifically the error you ran into has to do with loading the ~/.netrc configuration file.

See Issue #493.

For what it's worth, the equivalent in urllib3 would be:

import urllib3
http = urllib3.PoolManager()
response = http.request('GET', 'someurl')

Update: urllib3 v1.3 was released yesterday which includes AppEngine support.