Recently I ran into a script which tried to verify HTTPS connection and response to a specific IP address. The “traditional” way to do this is  (assuming I want http://example.com/some/path on IP 1.2.3.4):

    requests.get("http://1.2.3.4/some/path", headers={'Host': 'example.com'})

This is useful if I want to specifically test how 1.2.3.4 is responding; for instance, if example.com is DNS round-robined to several IP addresses and I want to hit one of them specifically.

This also works for https requests if using Python <2.7.9 because older versions don’t do SNI and thus don’t pass the requested hostname as part of the SSL handshake.

However, Python >=2.7.9 and >=3.4.x conveniently added SNI support, breaking this hackish way of connecting to the IP, because the IP address embedded in the URL is passed as part of the SSL handshake, causing errors (mainly, the server returns a 400 Bad Request because the SNI host 1.2.3.4 doesn’t match the one in the HTTP headers example.com).

The “easiest” way to achieve this is to force the IP address at the lowest possible level, namely when we do socket.create_connection. The rest of the “stack” is given the actual hostname. So the sequence is:

1. Open a socket to 1.2.3.4
2. SSL wrap this socket using the hostname.
3. Do the rest of the HTTPS traffic, headers and all over this socket.

Unfortunately Requests hides the socket.create_connection call in the deep recesses of urllib3, so the specified chain of classes is needed to propagate the given dest_ip value all the way down the stack.

After wrestling with this for a bit, I wrote a TransportAdapter and accompanying stack of subclasses to be able to pass a specific IP for connection.

Use it like this:

session = requests.Session()
session.mount("https://example.com", ForcedIPHTTPSAdapter(dest_ip='1.2.3.4'))
response = session.get(
    '/some/path', headers={'Host': 'example.com'}, verify=False)

There are a good number of subtleties on how it works, because it messes with the connection stack at all levels, I suggest you read the README to see how to use it in detail and whether it applies to you need. I even included a complete example script that uses this adapter.

Resources that helped:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22609385/python-requests-library-define-specific-dns

https://github.com/RhubarbSin/example-requests-transport-adapter/blob/master/adapter.py