The Requests module contains a session object, which has the capability to persist settings across the requests. Using this session object, we can persist cookies, we can create prepared requests, we can use the keep-alive feature and do many more things. The Session object contains all the methods of Requests API such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE and so on. Before using all the capabilities of the Session object, let us get to know how to use sessions and persist cookies across requests.

Let us use the session method to get the resource.

>>> import requests
>>> session = requests.Session()
>>> response = requests.get("https://google.co.in", cookies={"new-cookie-identifier": "1234abcd"})

In the preceding example, we created a session object with requests and its get method is used to access a web resource.

The cookie value which we had set in the previous example will be accessible using response.request.headers.

>>> response.request.headers
CaseInsensitiveDict({'Cookie': 'new-cookie-identifier=1234abcd', 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, compress', 'Accept': '*/*', 'User-Agent': 'python-requests/2.2.1 CPython/2.7.5+ Linux/3.13.0-43-generic'})
>>> response.request.headers['Cookie']
'new-cookie-identifier=1234abcd'

With session object, we can specify some default values of the properties, which needs to be sent to the server using GET, POST, PUT and so on. We can achieve this by specifying the values to the properties like headers, auth and so on, on a Session object.

>>> session.params = {"key1": "value", "key2": "value2"}
>>> session.auth = ('username', 'password')
>>> session.headers.update({'foo': 'bar'})

In the preceding example, we have set some default values to the properties—params, auth, and headers using the session object. We can override them in the subsequent request, as shown in the following example, if we want to:

>>> session.get('http://mysite.com/new/url', headers={'foo': 'new-bar'})