Configuring Async PRAW

Note

Async PRAW is fully compatible with the configuration system that PRAW uses.

Configuration options can be provided to Async PRAW in one of three ways:

Environment variables have the highest priority, followed by keyword arguments to Reddit, and finally settings in praw.ini files.

Using an HTTP or HTTPS proxy with Async PRAW

Async PRAW internally relies upon the aiohttp package to handle HTTP requests. Aiohttp supports use of HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY environment variables in order to proxy HTTP and HTTPS requests respectively [ref].

Given that Async PRAW exclusively communicates with Reddit via HTTPS, only the HTTPS_PROXY option should be required.

For example, if you have a script named prawbot.py, the HTTPS_PROXY environment variable can be provided on the command line like so:

HTTPS_PROXY=http://localhost:3128 ./prawbot.py

Contrary to the Requests library, aiohttp won’t read environment variables by default. But you can do so by passing trust_env=True into a custom ClientSession and configuring Async PRAW like so:

import asyncpraw
from aiohttp import ClientSession


session = ClientSession(trust_env=True)
reddit = asyncpraw.Reddit(
    client_id="SI8pN3DSbt0zor",
    client_secret="xaxkj7HNh8kwg8e5t4m6KvSrbTI",
    password="1guiwevlfo00esyy",
    requestor_kwargs={"session": session},  # pass the custom Session instance
    user_agent="testscript by u/fakebot3",
    username="fakebot3",
)

Configuring a custom aiohttp ClientSession

Async PRAW uses aiohttp to handle networking. If your use-case requires custom configuration, it is possible to configure a ClientSession and then use it with Async PRAW.

For example, some networks use self-signed SSL certificates when connecting to HTTPS sites. By default, this would raise an exception in aiohttp. To use a self-signed SSL certificate without an exception from aiohttp, first export the certificate as a .pem file. Then configure Async PRAW like so:

import ssl

import aiohttp
import asyncpraw


ssl_ctx = ssl.create_default_context(cafile="/path/to/certfile.pem")

conn = aiohttp.TCPConnector(ssl_context=ssl_ctx)
session = aiohttp.ClientSession(connector=conn)
reddit = asyncpraw.Reddit(
    client_id="SI8pN3DSbt0zor",
    client_secret="xaxkj7HNh8kwg8e5t4m6KvSrbTI",
    password="1guiwevlfo00esyy",
    requestor_kwargs={"session": session},  # pass the custom Session instance
    user_agent="testscript by u/fakebot3",
    username="fakebot3",
)

The code above creates a ClientSession and configures it to use a custom certificate, then passes it as a parameter when creating the Reddit instance. Note that the example above uses a Password Flow authentication type, but this method will work for any authentication type.