Python at AWS Lambda: `requests` from botocore.vendored deprecated, but `requests` not available

Question

I've got a Python script for an AWS Lambda function that does HTTP POST requests to another endpoint. Since Python's urllib2.request, https://docs.python.org/2/library/urllib2.html, can only handle data in the standard application/x-www-form-urlencoded format and I want to post JSON data, I used the Requests library, https://pypi.org/project/requests/2.7.0/.

That Requests library wasn't available at AWS Lambda in the Python runtime environment, so had to be imported via from botocore.vendored import requests. So far, so good.

Today, I get a deprecation warning on that:

DeprecationWarning: You are using the post() function from 'botocore.vendored.requests'.
This is not a public API in botocore and will be removed in the future.
Additionally, this version of requests is out of date. We recommend you install the
requests package, 'import requests' directly, and use the requests.post() function instead.

This was mentioned in this blog post from AWS too: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/removing-the-vendored-version-of-requests-from-botocore/.

Unfortunately, changing from botocore.vendored import requests into import requests results in the following error:

No module named 'requests'

Why is requests not available for the Python runtime at AWS Lambda? And how can I use / import it?

Answer 1

I succeeded sending HTTP POST requests using the urllib3 library, which is available at AWS Lambda without the requirements for additional installation instructions.

import urllib3

http = urllib3.PoolManager()

response = http.request('POST',
                        url,
                        body = json.dumps(some_data_structure),
                        headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'},
                        retries = False)

Answer 2

Answer 2020-06-18

I found a nice and easy way to use requests inside AWS Lambda functions!

Open this link and find the region that your function is using:
https://github.com/keithrozario/Klayers/tree/master/deployments/python3.8/arns

Open the .csv related to your region and search for the requests row.
This is the ARN related to requests library:
arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:770693421928:layer:Klayers-python38-requests:6

So now in your lambda function, add a layer using the ARN found.
Obs.: make sure your Python lambda function runtime is python3.8.