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 custom Session instance 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 the custom Session instance
    user_agent="testscript by u/fakebot3",
    username="fakebot3",
)

The code above creates a custom Session instance 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.