Is it possible to get only the header without fetching the body using the requests.get command? the server is blocking HEAD

Ouss 0
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In a configuration I am using, a minio server hosting files, accepts only GET requests and does not accepts HEAD requests. I need the header information to check for file-type to avoid fetching the entire file.

I would do it usually with requests.head(url) however as I mentioned earlier only the GET method is allowed.

In curl it is possible to do the following:

curl -I -X GET http://domain.dom/path/

which curls the header of the url but overrides the used method with the GET HTTP method. Is there something equivalent for the Python3 requests package?

curl python-requests http-headers python
2 Answers

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a clean way to do this. If the server accepts Range header, you could try requesting the bytes from 0 to 0, which nets you access to the header data but not the body. For example

import requests   

url = "http://stackoverflow.com"
headers = {"Range": "bytes=0-0"}
res = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

print(res.headers)

As said, this still depends on the server implementation. For reference: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Range

LTJ0

Based on the definition of a GET, it sounds like you could modify the request headers to include a range-request.

A client can alter the semantics of GET to be a "range request", requesting transfer of only some part(s) of the selected representation, by sending a Range header field in the request (Section 14.2).

I haven't tried this, but maybe setting a byte range of 0-1 would skip the body and you'd get the headers for free.

BCC0
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