I want to do parallel http request tasks in asyncio, but I find that python-requests would block the event loop of asyncio. I’ve found aiohttp but it couldn’t provide the service of http request using a http proxy.

So I want to know if there’s a way to do asynchronous http requests with the help of asyncio.

To use requests (or any other blocking libraries) with asyncio, you can use BaseEventLoop.run_in_executor to run a function in another thread and yield from it to get the result. For example:

import asyncio
import requests

@asyncio.coroutine
def main():
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    future1 = loop.run_in_executor(None, requests.get, 'http://www.google.com')
    future2 = loop.run_in_executor(None, requests.get, 'http://www.google.co.uk')
    response1 = yield from future1
    response2 = yield from future2
    print(response1.text)
    print(response2.text)

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(main())

This will get both responses in parallel.

With python 3.5 you can use the new await/async syntax:

import asyncio
import requests

async def main():
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    future1 = loop.run_in_executor(None, requests.get, 'http://www.google.com')
    future2 = loop.run_in_executor(None, requests.get, 'http://www.google.co.uk')
    response1 = await future1
    response2 = await future2
    print(response1.text)
    print(response2.text)

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(main())

See PEP0492 for more.

aiohttp can be used with HTTP proxy already:

import asyncio
import aiohttp


@asyncio.coroutine
def do_request():
    proxy_url = 'http://localhost:8118'  # your proxy address
    response = yield from aiohttp.request(
        'GET', 'http://google.com',
        proxy=proxy_url,
    )
    return response

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(do_request())

The answers above are still using the old Python 3.4 style coroutines. Here is what you would write if you got Python 3.5+.

aiohttp supports http proxy now

import aiohttp
import asyncio

async def fetch(session, url):
    async with session.get(url) as response:
        return await response.text()

async def main():
    urls = [
            'http://python.org',
            'https://google.com',
            'http://yifei.me'
        ]
    tasks = []
    async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
        for url in urls:
            tasks.append(fetch(session, url))
        htmls = await asyncio.gather(*tasks)
        for html in htmls:
            print(html[:100])

if __name__ == '__main__':
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    loop.run_until_complete(main())

Requests does not currently support asyncio and there are no plans to provide such support. It’s likely that you could implement a custom “Transport Adapter” (as discussed here) that knows how to use asyncio.

If I find myself with some time it’s something I might actually look into, but I can’t promise anything.

There is a good case of async/await loops and threading in an article by Pimin Konstantin Kefaloukos Easy parallel HTTP requests with Python and asyncio:

To minimize the total completion time, we could increase the size of the thread pool to match the number of requests we have to make. Luckily, this is easy to do as we will see next. The code listing below is an example of how to make twenty asynchronous HTTP requests with a thread pool of twenty worker threads:

# Example 3: asynchronous requests with larger thread pool
import asyncio
import concurrent.futures
import requests

async def main():

    with concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=20) as executor:

        loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
        futures = [
            loop.run_in_executor(
                executor, 
                requests.get, 
                'http://example.org/'
            )
            for i in range(20)
        ]
        for response in await asyncio.gather(*futures):
            pass


loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(main())