How to close a HTTP GET request in Python before the end

Does you server barf if your clients close the connection before it's fully downloaded? Well, there's an easy way to find out. You can use this Python script:

import sys
import requests

url = sys.argv[1]
assert '://' in url, url
r = requests.get(url, stream=True)
if r.encoding is None:
    r.encoding = 'utf-8'
for chunk in r.iter_content(1024, decode_unicode=True):
    break

I use the xh CLI tool a lot. It's like curl but better in some things. By default, if you use --headers it will make a regular GET request but close the connection as soon as it has gotten all the headers. E.g.

▶ xh --headers https://www.peterbe.com
HTTP/2.0 200 OK
cache-control: public,max-age=3600
content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
date: Wed, 30 Mar 2022 12:37:09 GMT
etag: "3f336-Rohm58s5+atf5Qvr04kmrx44iFs"
server: keycdn-engine
strict-transport-security: max-age=63072000; includeSubdomains; preload
vary: Accept-Encoding
x-cache: HIT
x-content-type-options: nosniff
x-edge-location: usat
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
x-middleware-cache: hit
x-powered-by: Express
x-shield: active
x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block

That's not be confused with doing HEAD like curl -I ....

So either with xh or the Python script above, you can get that same effect. It's a useful trick when you want to make sure your (async) server doesn't attempt to do weird stuff with the "Response" object after the connection has closed.