Configuring PRAW¶

Configuration Options

Configuration options can be provided to 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 PRAW¶

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

Given that 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

Configuring a custom requests Session¶

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

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

import praw
from requests import Session


session = Session()
session.verify = "/path/to/certfile.pem"
reddit = praw.Reddit(client_id="SI8pN3DSbt0zor",
    client_secret="xaxkj7HNh8kwg8e5t4m6KvSrbTI",
    password="1guiwevlfo00esyy",
    requestor_kwargs={"session": session},  # pass Session
    user_agent="testscript by u/fakebot3",
    username="fakebot3"
)

The code above creates a Session 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.