How to use Requests in python2.7 in Ubuntu 20.04

python-request.md

How to use Requests in python2.7 in Ubuntu 20.04

python-request package has been dropped in Ubuntu 20.04

According to https://packages.ubuntu.com/eoan/python-requests, the python-request package has been dropped after Ubuntu Eoan (19.10) => The package is no more available on Ubuntu focal (20.04)

As a consequence you can have legacy Python2 code that ends up with this type of error: (I assume that you have the python2-minimal package installed)

Python 2.7.18rc1 (default, Apr  7 2020, 12:05:55) 
[GCC 9.3.0] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import requests
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named requests

How to solve this

• best solution: port your code to Python3 :-) but the amount of effort can vary, and you are judge of how and when to do that
• solution I don't like: pip install the package: 99% of the solutions on the web mention this but IMHO it is not clean and can lead to issues, unless you use virtualenvs, pipenv, or docker etc.
• quick and easy solution: simply use the python3 package

Use the python3 package method

If you read the readthedocs site for Request, http://python-requests.org/ ( = https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/master/), they say:

Requests officially supports Python 2.7 & 3.4–3.7, and runs great on PyPy.

=> it is enough to install on Ubuntu 20.04 the python3-requests package (which is probably already present on your system), then you can look at where the library has been installed:

$ dpkg -L python3-requests | grep __init__.py
/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/requests/__init__.py

and either:

• create a sumbolic link from the python3 library zone to the python2 (probably /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages), or
• add this line to your legacy code:

Python 2.7.18rc1 (default, Apr  7 2020, 12:05:55) 
[GCC 9.3.0] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sys
>>> sys.path.append('/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages')
>>> import requests
>>> ^D 

Be aware however that simply doing this can be dangerous: some of the packages can be missing from the python2 library zone, taken from python3 and.. not be compatible! => you will have to check that your legacy application is working as intended.

Hope it helps.