Release Date: Dec. 21, 2020

This is the seventh maintenance release of Python 3.8

Note: The release you’re looking at is Python 3.8.7, a bugfix release for the legacy 3.8 series. Python 3.9 is now the latest feature release series of Python 3. Get the latest release of 3.9.x here.

macOS 11 Big Sur not fully supported

Python 3.8.7 is not yet fully supported on macOS 11 Big Sur. It will install on macOS 11 Big Sur and will run on Apple Silicon Macs using Rosetta 2 translation. However, a few features do not work correctly, most noticeably those involving searching for system libraries (vs user libraries) such as ctypes.util.find_library() and in Distutils. This limitation affects both Apple Silicon and Intel processors. We are looking into improving the situation for Python 3.8.8.

Major new features of the 3.8 series, compared to 3.7

• PEP 572, Assignment expressions
• PEP 570, Positional-only arguments
• PEP 587, Python Initialization Configuration (improved embedding)
• PEP 590, Vectorcall: a fast calling protocol for CPython
• PEP 578, Runtime audit hooks
• PEP 574, Pickle protocol 5 with out-of-band data
• Typing-related: PEP 591 (Final qualifier), PEP 586 (Literal types), and PEP 589 (TypedDict)
• Parallel filesystem cache for compiled bytecode
• Debug builds share ABI as release builds
• f-strings support a handy = specifier for debugging
• continue is now legal in finally: blocks
• on Windows, the default asyncio event loop is now ProactorEventLoop
• on macOS, the spawn start method is now used by default in multiprocessing
• multiprocessing can now use shared memory segments to avoid pickling costs between processes
• typed_ast is merged back to CPython
• LOAD_GLOBAL is now 40% faster
• pickle now uses Protocol 4 by default, improving performance

There are many other interesting changes, please consult the «What’s New» page in the documentation for a full list.

More resources

• Online Documentation
• PEP 569, 3.8 Release Schedule
• Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.
• Help fund Python and its community.

Windows users

• The binaries for AMD64 will also work on processors that implement the Intel 64 architecture. (Also known as the «x64» architecture, and formerly known as both «EM64T» and «x86-64».)
• There are now «web-based» installers for Windows platforms; the installer will download the needed software components at installation time.
• There are redistributable zip files containing the Windows builds, making it easy to redistribute Python as part of another software package. Please see the documentation regarding Embedded Distribution for more information.

macOS users

• For Python 3.8, we provide one installer: 64-bit-only that works on macOS 10.9 (Mavericks) and later systems.
• Please read the «Important Information» displayed during installation for information about SSL/TLS certificate validation and the running the «Install Certificates.command».

And now for something completely different

(Cut to BBC world symbol.)
Continuity Voice: (Eric Idle) Now on BBC television a choice of viewing. On BBC 2 — a discussion on censorship between Derek Hart, The Bishop of Woolwich, and a nude man. And on BBC 1 — me telling you this. And now.
(Sound of TV set bring switched off. The picture reduces to a spot and we see it was actually on a TV set which has just been switched off by the housewife. The inspector holds a cup with a cherry on a stick in it.)
She: (Terry Jones) We don’t want that, do we. Do you really want that cherry in your tea? Do you like doing this job?
Inspector: (Michael Palin) Well, it’s a living, isn’t it?

Downloading Files using Python (Simple Examples)

In this tutorial, you will learn how to download files from the web using different Python modules. You will download regular files, web pages, Amazon S3, and other sources.

Also, you will learn how to overcome many challenges that you may counter, such as downloading files that redirect, downloading large files, multithreaded download, and other tactics.

Table of Contents

Using requests

You can download files from a URL using the requests module.

Consider the code below:

Simply, get the URL using the get method of requests module and store the result into a variable “myfile” variable. Then you write the contents of the variable into a file.

Using wget

You can also download a file from a URL by using the wget module of Python. Install the wget module using pip as follows:

Consider the following code in which we will download the logo image of Python:

In this code, we passed the URL along with the path (where we will store the image) to the download method of the wget module.

Download file that redirects

In this section, you will learn to download from a URL that redirects to another URL with a .pdf file using requests. The URL is like the following:

To download this pdf file, use the following code:

In this code, the first step we specify the URL. Then we use the get method of the requests module to fetch the URL. In the get method, we set the allow_redirects to True, which will allow redirection in the URL. After redirection, the content will be in myfile variable.

Finally, we open a file to write the fetched content.

Download large file in chunks

Consider the code blew:

First, we use the get method of the requests module as we did before, but this time we will set the stream attribute to True.

Then we create a file named PythonBook.pdf in the current working directory and open it for writing.

Then we specify the chunk size that we want to download at a time. We have set to 1024 bytes. Iterate through each chunk and write the chunks in the file until the chunks finished.

The Python shell will look like the following when the chunks are downloading:

Not pretty? Don’t worry; we will show a progress bar for the downloading process later.

Download multiple files (Parallel/bulk download)

To download multiple files at a time, import the following modules:

We imported the os and time modules to check how much time it takes to download files. The module ThreadPool lets you run multiple threads or processes using the pool.

Let’s create a simple function which sends the response to a file in chunks:

The URLs variable is a two-dimensional array that specifies the path and the URL of a page you want to download.

Pass the URL to requests.get as we did in the previous section. Finally, open the file (path specified in the URL) and write the content of the page.

Now we can call this function for each URL separately, and we can also call this function for all the URLs at the same time. Let’s do it for each URL separately in for loop and notice the timer:

The result will be like this:

Now replace the for loop with the following line of code:

Download with a progress bar

The Progress bar is a UI widget of the clint module. To install the clint module, type the following command:

Consider the following code:

In this code, we imported the requests module and then from clint.textui, we imported the progress widget. The only difference is in the for loop. We used the bar method of the progress module while writing the content into the file. The output will be like the following:

Download a webpage using urllib

In this section, we will be downloading a webpage using the urllib.

The urllib library is a standard library of Python, so you do not need to install it.

The following line of code can easily download a webpage:

Specify the URL here that you want to save as and where you want to store it:

In this code, we used the urlretrieve method and passed the URL of a file along with the path where we will save the file. The file extension will be .html.

Download via proxy

If you need to use a proxy to download your files, you can use the ProxyHandler of the urllib module. Check the following code:

In this code, we created the proxy object and opened the proxy by invoking the build_opener method of urllib and passed the proxy object. Then we made the request to retrieve the page.

Also, you can use the requests module as documented in the official documentation:

Simply import the requests module and create your proxy object. Then you can retrieve the file.

Using urllib3

The urllib3 is an improved version of the urllib module. You can download and install it using pip:

We will fetch a web page and store it in a text file by using urllib3.

Import the following modules:

You can use the shutil module when working with files. Now initialize the URL string variable like this:

Then we use the PoolManager of urllib3 that keeps track of necessary connection pools.

Finally, we send a GET request to fetch the URL and open a file and write the response into that file:

Download file from S3 using boto3

To download files from Amazon S3, you can use the Python boto3 module.

First, you need to install the awscli module using pip:

For AWS configuration, run the following command:

Now enter your details as:

To download a file from Amazon S3, import boto3, and botocore. Boto3 is an Amazon SDK for Python to access Amazon web services such as S3. Botocore provides the command line services to interact with Amazon web services.

Botocore comes with awscli. To install boto3 run the following:

Now import these two modules:

When downloading files from Amazon, we need three parameters:

1. The name of Bucket
2. The name of the file you need to download
3. The name of the file after it has downloaded

Initialize the variables:

Now initialize a variable to use the resource of a session. For this, we will call the resource() method of boto3 and pass the service which is s3:

Finally, download the file by using the download_file method and pass in the variables:

Using asyncio

You can use the asyncio module to handle system events. It works around an event loop that waits for an event to occur and then reacts to that event. The reaction can be calling another function. This process is called event handling. The asyncio module uses coroutines for event handling.

To use the asyncio event handling and coroutine functionality, we will import the asyncio module:

Also, we need to install aiohttp module.

We will import the async_timeout module to handle timeouts.

The keyword async tells that this is a native asyncio coroutine. Inside the body of the coroutine, we have the await keyword, which returns a certain value. We also used the return keyword.

Now let’s create a code using a coroutine to download files from the web:

In this code, we created an async coroutine function that downloads our files in chunks and saves them with a random file name and returns a message.

Then we have another async coroutine calls the get_url and waits for the URLs and make a queue of all URLs.

Now to start the coroutine, we have to put the coroutine inside the event loop by using the get_event_loop() method of asyncio and finally, the event loop is executed using the run_until_complete() method of asyncio.

Downloading files using Python is fun. I hope you find the tutorial useful.

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Looking for Python 2.7? See below for specific releases

Active Python Releases

1. 3.9 bugfix 2020-10-05 2025-10 PEP 596
2. 3.8 bugfix 2019-10-14 2024-10 PEP 569
3. 3.7 security 2018-06-27 2023-06-27 PEP 537
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For most Unix systems, you must download and compile the source code. The same source code archive can also be used to build the Windows and Mac versions, and is the starting point for ports to all other platforms.

Download the latest Python 3 and Python 2 source.

Alternative Implementations

This site hosts the «traditional» implementation of Python (nicknamed CPython). A number of alternative implementations are available as well.

History

Python was created in the early 1990s by Guido van Rossum at Stichting Mathematisch Centrum in the Netherlands as a successor of a language called ABC. Guido remains Python’s principal author, although it includes many contributions from others.

Release Schedules

Information about specific ports, and developer info

OpenPGP Public Keys

Source and binary executables are signed by the release manager or binary builder using their OpenPGP key. Release files for currently supported releases are signed by the following:

Release files for older releases which have now reached end-of-life may have been signed by one of the following:

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You can import a person’s public keys from a public keyserver network server you trust by running a command like:

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• (These instructions are geared to GnuPG and Unix command-line users.)

Other Useful Items

• Looking for 3rd party Python modules? The Package Index has many of them.
• You can view the standard documentation online, or you can download it in HTML, PostScript, PDF and other formats. See the main Documentation page.
• Information on tools for unpacking archive files provided on python.org is available.
• Tip: even if you download a ready-made binary for your platform, it makes sense to also download the source. This lets you browse the standard library (the subdirectory Lib) and the standard collections of demos (Demo) and tools (Tools) that come with it. There’s a lot you can learn from the source!
• There is also a collection of Emacs packages that the Emacsing Pythoneer might find useful. This includes major modes for editing Python, C, C++, Java, etc., Python debugger interfaces and more. Most packages are compatible with Emacs and XEmacs.

Want to contribute?

Want to contribute? See the Python Developer’s Guide to learn about how Python development is managed.