Upgrading from previous versions

Prior to 1.0, the last release of akismet was in 2009. If you were still using that release (0.2.0), there are some changes you’ll need to be aware of when upgrading to 1.0.

Configuration via file no longer supported

In 0.2.0, akismet supported configuration via a file named apikey.txt. Support for this has been removed in favor of either explicitly configuring via arguments as the Akismet class is instantiated, or configuring via environment variables. If you were relying on an apikey.txt file for configuration, you will need to switch to explicit arguments or environment variables.

Custom user agent no longer supported

In 0.2.0, akismet allowed you to specify the string which would be sent in the User-Agent HTTP header. The Akismet web service documentation now recomends a standard format for the User-Agent header, and as a result this is no longer directly configurable. The User-Agent string of akismet will now be based on the Python version and the version of akismet, in accordance with the Akismet service’s recommendation. For example, akismet 1.0 on Python 3.5 will send the string Python/3.5 | akismet.py/1.0.

If you do need to send a custom User-Agent, you can subclass Akismet and change the attribute user_agent_header to a dictionary specifying the header you want. For example:

import akismet

class MyAkismet(akismet.Akismet):
    user_agent_header = {'User-Agent': 'My Akismet application'}

requests is now a dependency

Prior versions of akismet were implemented solely using modules in the Python standard library. As the Python standard library’s support for easily performing HTTP requests is poor, akismet as of 1.0 has a dependency on the requests library, which will be automatically installed for you when you install a packaged copy of akismet 1.0.

API changes

Finally, the public API of akismet has been modified to match the current interface of the Akismet web service. This has resulted in the removal of one public method of Akismet – setAPIKey – and changes to the argument signatures of other methods.

For details of the updated interface, consult the usage overview document.