Download large file in python with requests

Requests is a really nice library. I'd like to use it for downloading big files (>1GB). The problem is it's not possible to keep whole file in memory; I need to read it in chunks. And this is a problem with the following code:

import requests

def DownloadFile(url)
    local_filename = url.split('/')[-1]
    r = requests.get(url)
    f = open(local_filename, 'wb')
    for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=512 * 1024): 
        if chunk: # filter out keep-alive new chunks
            f.write(chunk)
    f.close()
    return 

For some reason it doesn't work this way: it still loads the response into memory before it is saved to a file.

UPDATE

If you need a small client (Python 2.x /3.x) which can download big files from FTP, you can find it here. It supports multithreading & reconnects (it does monitor connections) also it tunes socket params for the download task.

With the following streaming code, the Python memory usage is restricted regardless of the size of the downloaded file:

def download_file(url):
    local_filename = url.split('/')[-1]
    # NOTE the stream=True parameter below
    with requests.get(url, stream=True) as r:
        r.raise_for_status()
        with open(local_filename, 'wb') as f:
            for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=8192): 
                # If you have chunk encoded response uncomment if
                # and set chunk_size parameter to None.
                #if chunk: 
                f.write(chunk)
    return local_filename

Note that the number of bytes returned using iter_content is not exactly the chunk_size; it's expected to be a random number that is often far bigger, and is expected to be different in every iteration.

See body-content-workflow and Response.iter_content for further reference.

It's much easier if you use Response.raw and shutil.copyfileobj():

import requests
import shutil

def download_file(url):
    local_filename = url.split('/')[-1]
    with requests.get(url, stream=True) as r:
        with open(local_filename, 'wb') as f:
            shutil.copyfileobj(r.raw, f)

    return local_filename

This streams the file to disk without using excessive memory, and the code is simple.

Note: According to the documentation, Response.raw will not decode gzip and deflate transfer-encodings, so you will need to do this manually.