How to force external python packages use requests with proxy

Question

I'm writing a job to download some reports from an API. There is an external python package which does this for me by simply use:

from module import Api

api = Api(token='token')
api.download_data(save_to='file_name.csv')

But this Api is critical for the caller IP address (some reports are available only for specific location), so I am forced to change my location either via VPN or socks proxy.

There are few reports I have to download from different locations, so I decided to use proxies.

I mentioned that under the hood my module uses requests library to retrieve the data.

How can I force requests lib to use my proxies for external functions?

Answer 1

It turned out that this can be implemented via old-style decorators pretty simple:

# config.py
HTTP_METHODS = ['get', 'post', 'put', 'delete', 'head', 'patch', 'options']

# helper.py
import requests

from config import HTTP_METHODS


def _add_proxy(http_req, country):
    # retrieve proxy settings for the country
    proxy = get_proxy(country)
    def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):    
        kwargs['proxies'] = proxy
        return http_req(*args, **kwargs)
    return wrapper


def patch_requests_with_proxy(country):
    for m in HTTP_METHODS:
        setattr(requests, m, _add_proxy(getattr(requests, m), country))

That usage of my new script will be:

from module import Api
from helper import patch_requests_with_proxy


api = Api(token='token')
patch_requests_with_proxy('ContryName1')
api.download_data(save_to='file_name1.csv')

patch_requests_with_proxy('ContryName2')
api.download_data(save_to='file_name2.csv')

My script is job-based, so I don't need any kind of unpatch functionality.