Using certificates in urllib3

Question

I'm a Python newbie. I'm using urllib3 to talk to an api. The reason I'm using this and not requests is that I'd like to host my app on GAE. My app uses certicates. When I post data, I get the following error:

TypeError: __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'cert_reqs'

How can I include certs in my urlopen call? A snippet of code follows

CA_CERTS = ('client-2048.crt', 'client-2048.key')

http = urllib3.PoolManager()
r = http.urlopen('POST', url, body=payload, headers={'X-Application': '???', 'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'}, cert_reqs='REQUIRED', ca_certs=CA_CERTS)
print r.status, r.data

Answer 1

You can drop down to the HTTPSConnectionPool level which you may do directly:

from urllib3.connectionpool import HTTPSConnectionPool
conn = HTTPSConnectionPool('httpbin.org', ca_certs='/etc/pki/tls/cert.pem', cert_reqs='REQUIRED')

Or, more simply or via the connection_from_url() helper function:

conn = urllib3.connection_from_url('https://httpbin.org', ca_certs='/etc/pki/tls/cert.pem', cert_reqs='REQUIRED')

Note that ca_certs is the file name of a certificate bundle used to validate the remote server's certificate. Use cert_file and key_file to present your client certificate to the remote server:

conn = urllib3.connection_from_url('https://httpbin.org', cert_file='client-2048.crt', key_file='client-2048.key', ca_certs='/etc/pki/tls/cert.pem', cert_reqs='REQUIRED')

Then issue your request:

response = conn.request('POST', 'https://httpbin.org/post', fields={'field1':1234, 'field2':'blah'})
>>> print response.data
{
  "args": {},
  "data": "",
  "files": {},
  "form": {
    "field1": "1234",
    "field2": "blah"
  },
  "headers": {
    "Accept-Encoding": "identity",
    "Connection": "close",
    "Content-Length": "220",
    "Content-Type": "multipart/form-data; boundary=048b02ad15274fc485c2cb2b6a280034",
    "Host": "httpbin.org",
    "X-Request-Id": "92fbc1da-d83e-439c-9468-65d27492664f"
  },
  "json": null,
  "origin": "220.233.14.203",
  "url": "http://httpbin.org/post"
}

Answer 2

you should pass the cert_reqs='REQUIRED' and ca_certs=CA_CERTS args to the PoolManager() instantiation directly.

So the original example can be changed to this:

CA_CERTS = ('client-2048.crt', 'client-2048.key')

http = urllib3.PoolManager(cert_reqs='REQUIRED', ca_certs=CA_CERTS)

r = http.urlopen('POST', url, body=payload, headers={'X-Application': '???', 'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'})
print r.status, r.data