Python http.client for HTTPS Connection

PKI Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Python Scripts Communicating with HTTPS Servers

∟Python http.client for HTTPS Connection

This section provides a tutorial example on how to use the http.client Python module to connect to an HTTPS server.

If you want to write your own Python program to communicate with an HTTPS Web server, you should start the http.client module and the HTTPSConnection(host) class:

http.client - A built-in module that implements the client side of the HTTP and HTTPS protocols.
http.client.HTTPSConnection() - A class that uses HTTPS (HTTP + SSL) to create communication connection with remote servers.

Here is my first Python script to verify HTTPS support provided by http.client and ssl modules:

#- http-client-HTTPS-test.py
#- Copyright (c) 2025 HerongYang.com. All Rights Reserved.

import sys
host = sys.argv[1]

import http.client
conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection(host)
conn.request("GET", "/")
res = conn.getresponse()

print(res.headers)
content = res.read(64)
print(content)

conn.close()

Several methods and properties from the http.client module are used in the script:

conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection(host) - Instantiation method to create an http.client.HTTPSConnection object with the host name of a remote server, representing the HTTPS (HTTP + SSL) connection.
conn.request("GET", "/") - Instance method to send a "GET" request to the remote server through the HTTPS connect.
res = conn.getresponse() - Instance method to retrieve the response object of the last request made through the HTTPS connect.
res.headers - Instance property of the response object representing headers of the response.
content = res.read(64) - Instance method to read the content of the response for 64 bytes.

Now let's run this script to connect to the Google HTTPS server, with the root CA certificate file on my Mac computer running Python 3.8:

herong$ python3 --version 
  Python 3.8.0

herong$ python3 http-client-HTTPS-test.py www.google.com
  Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:57:24 GMT
  Expires: -1
  Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
  Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only: object-src 'none';base-uri ...
  Accept-CH: Sec-CH-Prefers-Color-Scheme
  P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See g.co/p3phelp for more info."
  Server: gws
  X-XSS-Protection: 0
  X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
  Set-Cookie: __Secure-STRP=AEEP7gL0a5p8tl7r2F36zZkFzdbUaZJgq2bJvTdKx...
  Alt-Svc: h3=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-29=":443"; ma=2592000
  Accept-Ranges: none
  Vary: Accept-Encoding
  Transfer-Encoding: chunked

  b'<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/We'