WebOb provides objects for HTTP requests and responses. Specifically it does this by wrapping the WSGI request environment and response status/headers/app_iter(body).

The request and response objects provide many conveniences for parsing HTTP request and forming HTTP responses. Both objects are read/write: as a result, WebOb is also a nice way to create HTTP requests and parse HTTP responses; however, we won't cover that use case in this document. The reference documentation shows many examples of creating requests.


The request object is a wrapper around the WSGI environ dictionary. This dictionary contains keys for each header, keys that describe the request (including the path and query string), a file-like object for the request body, and a variety of custom keys. You can always access the environ with req.environ.

Some of the most important and interesting attributes of a request object are the following:

The request method, e.g., 'GET', 'POST'
A dictionary-like object with all the variables in the query string.
A dictionary-like object with all the variables in the request body. This only has variables if the request was a POST and it is a form submission.
A dictionary-like object with a combination of everything in req.GET and req.POST.
The contents of the body of the request. This contains the entire request body as a string. This is useful when the request is a POST that is not a form submission, or a request like a PUT. You can also get req.body_file for a file-like object.
A simple dictionary of all the cookies.
A dictionary of all the headers. This dictionary is case-insensitive.
req.urlvars and req.urlargs:
req.urlvars is the keyword parameters associated with the request URL. req.urlargs are the positional parameters. These are set by products like Routes and Selector.

Also for standard HTTP request headers, there are usually attributes, e.g., req.accept_language, req.content_length, and req.user_agent. These properties expose the parsed form of each header, for whatever parsing makes sense. For instance, req.if_modified_since returns a datetime object (or None if the header is was not provided). Details are in the Request reference.


In addition to these attributes, there are several ways to get the URL of the request. I'll show various values for an example URL http://localhost/app-root/doc?article_id=10, where the application is mounted at http://localhost/app-root.

The full request URL, with query string, e.g., 'http://localhost/app-root/doc?article_id=10'.
The URL of the application (just the SCRIPT_NAME portion of the path, not PATH_INFO), e.g., 'http://localhost/app-root'.
The URL with the host, e.g., 'http://localhost'.
req.relative_url(url, to_application=False):
Gives a URL, relative to the current URL. If to_application is True, then the URL is resolved relative to req.application_url.


There are several methods in webob.Request but only a few you'll use often:

Creates a new request with blank information, based at the given URL. This can be useful for subrequests and artificial requests. You can also use req.copy() to copy an existing request, or for subrequests req.copy_get() which copies the request but always turns it into a GET (which is safer to share for subrequests).
This method calls the given WSGI application with this request, and returns a Response object. You can also use this for subrequests or testing.


Many of the properties in the request object will return unicode values if the request encoding/charset is provided. The client can indicate the charset with something like Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf8, but browsers seldom set this. You can set the charset with req.charset = 'utf8', or during instantiation with Request(environ, charset='utf8'). If you subclass Request you can also set charset as a class-level attribute.

If it is set, then req.POST, req.GET, req.params, and req.cookies will contain unicode strings.


The response object looks a lot like the request object, though with some differences. The request object wraps a single environ object; the response object has three fundamental parts (based on WSGI):

The response code plus message, like '200 OK'. To set the code without the reason, use response.status_code = 200.
A list of all the headers, like [('Content-Type', 'text/html')]. There's a case-insensitive dictionary-like object in response.headers that also allows you to access these same headers.
An iterable (such as a list or generator) that will produce the content of the response. This is also accessible as response.body (a string), response.unicode_body (a unicode object, informed by response.charset), and response.body_file (a file-like object; writing to it appends to app_iter).

Everything else in the object derives from this underlying state. Here are the highlights:

The content type not including the charset parameter. Typical use: response.content_type = 'text/html'. You can subclass Response and add a class-level attribute default_content_type to set this automatically on instantiation.
The charset parameter of the content-type, it also informs encoding in response.unicode_body. response.content_type_params is a dictionary of all the parameters.
response.set_cookie(name=None, value='', max_age=None, path='/', domain=None, secure=False, httponly=False, comment=None, overwrite=False):
Set a cookie. The keyword arguments control the various cookie parameters. The max_age argument is the length for the cookie to live in seconds (you may also use a timedelta object).
response.delete_cookie(key, path='/', domain=None):
Delete a cookie from the client. This sets max_age to 0 and the cookie value to ''.
This makes this response cacheable for the given number of seconds, or if seconds is 0 then the response is uncacheable (this also sets the Expires header).
response(environ, start_response): The response object is a WSGI
application. As an application, it acts according to how you create it. It can do conditional responses if you pass conditional_response=True when instantiating (or set that attribute later). It can also do HEAD and Range requests.


Like the request, most HTTP response headers are available as properties. These are parsed, so you can do things like response.last_modified = os.path.getmtime(filename).

Instantiating the Response

Of course most of the time you just want to make a response. Generally any attribute of the response can be passed in as a keyword argument to the class, e.g.:

response = Response(body='hello world!', content_type='text/plain')

The status defaults to '200 OK'. The content_type defaults to default_content_type which is set to text/html, although if you subclass Response and set default_content_type, you can override this behavior.


To facilitate error responses like 404 Not Found, the module webob.exc contains classes for each kind of error response. These include boring but appropriate error bodies.

Each class is named webob.exc.HTTP*, where * is the reason for the error. For instance, webob.exc.HTTPNotFound. It subclasses Response, so you can manipulate the instances in the same way. A typical example is:

response = HTTPNotFound('There is no such resource')
# or:
response = HTTPMovedPermanently(location=new_url)

You can use this like:

    # ... stuff ...
    raise HTTPNotFound('No such resource')
except HTTPException, e:
    return e(environ, start_response)

The exceptions are still WSGI applications, but you cannot set attributes like content_type, charset, etc., on these exception objects.


Several parts of WebOb use a "multidict", which is a dictionary where a key can have multiple values. The quintessential example is a query string like ?pref=red&pref=blue. The pref variable has two values, red and blue.

In a multidict, when you do request.GET['pref'], you'll get back only 'blue' (the last value of pref). Sometimes returning a string and other times returning a list is a cause of frequent exceptions. If you want all the values back, use request.GET.getall('pref'). If you want to be sure there is one and only one value, use request.GET.getone('pref'), which will raise an exception if there is zero or more than one value for pref.

When you use operations like request.GET.items(), you'll get back something like [('pref', 'red'), ('pref', 'blue')]. All the key/value pairs will show up. Similarly request.GET.keys() returns ['pref', 'pref']. Multidict is a view on a list of tuples; all the keys are ordered, and all the values are ordered.


The file-serving example shows how to do more advanced HTTP techniques, while the comment middleware example shows middleware. For applications, it's more reasonable to use WebOb in the context of a larger framework. Pyramid, and its predecessor Pylons, both use WebOb.

Status and License

WebOb is an extraction and refinement of pieces from Paste. It is under active development on GitHub. It was originally written by Ian Bicking, and is maintained by the Pylons Project.

You can clone the source code with:

$ git clone https://github.com/Pylons/webob.git

Report issues on the issue tracker.

If you've got questions that aren't answered by this documentation, contact the pylons-discuss mail list or join the #pyramid IRC channel.

WebOb is released under an MIT-style license.