Fetch a file from a local url with Python requests?

As @WooParadog explained requests library doesn't know how to handle local files. Although, current version allows to define transport adapters.

Therefore you can simply define you own adapter which will be able to handle local files, e.g.:

from requests_testadapter import Resp

class LocalFileAdapter(requests.adapters.HTTPAdapter):
    def build_response_from_file(self, request):
        file_path = request.url[7:]
        with open(file_path, 'rb') as file:
            buff = bytearray(os.path.getsize(file_path))
            file.readinto(buff)
            resp = Resp(buff)
            r = self.build_response(request, resp)

            return r

    def send(self, request, stream=False, timeout=None,
             verify=True, cert=None, proxies=None):

        return self.build_response_from_file(request)

requests_session = requests.session()
requests_session.mount('file://', LocalFileAdapter())
requests_session.get('file://<some_local_path>')

I'm using requests-testadapter module in the above example.

Here's a transport adapter I wrote which is more featureful than b1r3k's and has no additional dependencies beyond Requests itself. I haven't tested it exhaustively yet, but what I have tried seems to be bug-free.

import requests
import os, sys

if sys.version_info.major < 3:
    from urllib import url2pathname
else:
    from urllib.request import url2pathname

class LocalFileAdapter(requests.adapters.BaseAdapter):
    """Protocol Adapter to allow Requests to GET file:// URLs

    @todo: Properly handle non-empty hostname portions.
    """

    @staticmethod
    def _chkpath(method, path):
        """Return an HTTP status for the given filesystem path."""
        if method.lower() in ('put', 'delete'):
            return 501, "Not Implemented"  # TODO
        elif method.lower() not in ('get', 'head'):
            return 405, "Method Not Allowed"
        elif os.path.isdir(path):
            return 400, "Path Not A File"
        elif not os.path.isfile(path):
            return 404, "File Not Found"
        elif not os.access(path, os.R_OK):
            return 403, "Access Denied"
        else:
            return 200, "OK"

    def send(self, req, **kwargs):  # pylint: disable=unused-argument
        """Return the file specified by the given request

        @type req: C{PreparedRequest}
        @todo: Should I bother filling `response.headers` and processing
               If-Modified-Since and friends using `os.stat`?
        """
        path = os.path.normcase(os.path.normpath(url2pathname(req.path_url)))
        response = requests.Response()

        response.status_code, response.reason = self._chkpath(req.method, path)
        if response.status_code == 200 and req.method.lower() != 'head':
            try:
                response.raw = open(path, 'rb')
            except (OSError, IOError) as err:
                response.status_code = 500
                response.reason = str(err)

        if isinstance(req.url, bytes):
            response.url = req.url.decode('utf-8')
        else:
            response.url = req.url

        response.request = req
        response.connection = self

        return response

    def close(self):
        pass

(Despite the name, it was completely written before I thought to check Google, so it has nothing to do with b1r3k's.) As with the other answer, follow this with:

requests_session = requests.session()
requests_session.mount('file://', LocalFileAdapter())
r = requests_session.get('file:///path/to/your/file')