How can you persist a single authenticated requests session in python?

Question

I am using the python requests library to intereact with an api.

I am first authenticating, getting a session-id and then creating a request session to persist that connection.

So I created a class to do this, but every time I use the class I am reinitialising and doing the authentication again. Which I want to avoid. Essentially I created an API between the API I am calling using DRF. How can I ensure that only 1 authenticated session is used across the entire app and that it persists through multiple request?

The class:

class RestClient:

    session = None

    def create_rest_client(self):
        auth = requests.auth.HTTPBasicAuth(
            USERNAME,
            PASSWORD
        )
        response = requests.post(
            f'https://{ settings.HOST }/rest/session',
            auth=auth
        )

        session = requests.Session()
        session_id = response.json().get('value')
        session.headers.update({'api-session-id': session_id})

        return session

    def get_rest_client(self):
        if self.session:
            return self.session
        else:
            return self.create_rest_client()

Using the class I instantiate and get the client (naturally redoing the auth). I think this should either be global or a singleton.

Using class:

class ProductDetail(APIView):

    def get(self, request, format=None, **kwargs):
        response = []

        rest_client = RestClient()
        session = rest_client.get_rest_client()

        response = session.get(
            ....use authenticated session
        )

        return Response(response.json())

Answer 1

I'd wire up a property like this:

class RestClient:
    _session = None

    @property
    def session(self):
        if self._session:
            return self._session

        auth = requests.auth.HTTPBasicAuth(USERNAME, PASSWORD)
        response = requests.post(
            f"https://{ settings.HOST }/rest/session", auth=auth
        )

        session = requests.Session()
        session_id = response.json().get("value")
        session.headers.update({"api-session-id": session_id})

        self._session = session
        return session

Now you can simply do client.session and it will be set up on the first access and reused thereafter.

EDIT: To persist this between RestClient instances, change references to self._session to RestClient._session.