SSL InsecurePlatform error when using Requests package

Question

Im using Python 2.7.3 and Requests. I installed Requests via pip. I believe it's the latest version. I'm running on Debian Wheezy.

I've used Requests lots of times in the past and never faced this issue, but it seems that when making https requests with Requests I get an InsecurePlatform exception.

The error mentions urllib3, but I don't have that installed. I did install it to check if it resolved the error, but it didn't.

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/packages/urllib3
/util/ssl_.py:79: InsecurePlatformWarning: A true SSLContext object is not
available. This prevents urllib3 from configuring SSL appropriately and 
may cause certain SSL connections to fail. For more information, see 
https://urllib3.readthedocs.org/en/latest  
/security.html#insecureplatformwarning.

Any ideas as to why I'm getting this? I've checked the docs, as specified in the error message, but the docs are saying to import urllib3 and either disable the warning, or provide a certificate.

Answer 1

Use the somewhat hidden security feature:

pip install requests[security] or pip install pyOpenSSL ndg-httpsclient pyasn1

Both commands install following extra packages:

• pyOpenSSL
• cryptography
• idna

Please note that this is not required for python-2.7.9+.

If pip install fails with errors, check whether you have required development packages for libffi, libssl and python installed in your system using distribution's package manager:

• Debian/Ubuntu - python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev packages.

• Fedora - openssl-devel python-devel libffi-devel packages.

Distro list above is incomplete.

Workaround (see the original answer by @TomDotTom):

In case you cannot install some of the required development packages, there's also an option to disable that warning:

import requests.packages.urllib3
requests.packages.urllib3.disable_warnings()

If your pip itself is affected by InsecurePlatformWarning and cannot install anything from PyPI, it can be fixed with this step-by-step guide to deploy extra python packages manually.

Answer 2

Requests 2.6 introduced this warning for users of python prior to 2.7.9 with only stock SSL modules available.

Assuming you can't upgrade to a newer version of python, this will install more up-to-date python SSL libraries:

pip install --upgrade ndg-httpsclient 

HOWEVER, this may fail on some systems without the build-dependencies for pyOpenSSL. On debian systems, running this before the pip command above should be enough for pyOpenSSL to build:

apt-get install python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev