Migrating your code from v5 to v6

web3.py follows Semantic Versioning, which means that version 6 introduced backwards-incompatible changes. If your project depends on web3.py v6, then you’ll probably need to make some changes.

Breaking Changes:

Strict Bytes Checking by Default

web3.py v6 moved to requiring strict bytes checking by default. This means that if an ABI specifies a bytes4 argument, web3.py will invalidate any entry that is not encodable as a bytes type with length of 4. This means only 0x-prefixed hex strings with a length of 4 and bytes types with a length of 4 will be considered valid. This removes doubt that comes from inferring values and assuming they should be padded.

This behavior was previously available in via the w3.enable_strict_bytes_checking() method. This is now, however, a toggleable flag on the Web3 instance via the w3.strict_bytes_type_checking property. As outlined above, this property is set to True by default but can be toggled on and off via the property’s setter (e.g. w3.strict_bytes_type_checking = False).

Snake Case

web3.py v6 moved to the more Pythonic convention of snake_casing wherever possible. There are some exceptions to this pattern:

  • Contract methods and events use whatever is listed in the ABI. If the smart contract convention is to use camelCase for method and event names, web3.py won’t do any magic to convert it to snake_casing.

  • Arguments to JSON-RPC methods. For example: transaction and filter parameters still use camelCasing. The reason for this is primarily due to error messaging. It would be confusing to pass in a snake_cased parameter and get an error message with a camelCased parameter.

  • Data that is returned from JSON-RPC methods. For example: The keys in a transaction receipt will still be returned as camelCase.

Python 3.10 and 3.11 Support

Support for Python 3.10 and 3.11 is here. In order to support Python 3.10, we had to update the websockets dependency to v10+.

Exceptions

Exceptions inherit from a base class

In v5, some web3.py exceptions inherited from AttributeError, namely:

  • NoABIFunctionsFound

  • NoABIFound

  • NoABIEventsFound

Others inherited from ValueError, namely:

  • InvalidAddress

  • NameNotFound

  • LogTopicError

  • InvalidEventABI

Now web3.py exceptions inherit from the same base Web3Exception.

As such, any code that was expecting a ValueError or an AttributeError from web3.py must update to expecting one of the exceptions listed above, or Web3Exception.

Similarly, exceptions raised in the EthPM and ENS modules inherit from the base EthPMException and ENSException, respectively.

ValidationError

The Python dev tooling ecosystem is moving towards standardizing ValidationError, so users know that they’re catching the correct ValidationError. The base ValidationError is imported from eth_utils. However, we also wanted to empower users to catch all errors emitted by a particular module. So we now have a Web3ValidationError, EthPMValidationError, and an ENSValidationError that all inherit from the generic eth_utils.exceptions.ValidationError.

Web3 class split into Web3 and AsyncWeb3

The Web3 class previously contained both sync and async methods. We’ve separated Web3 and AsyncWeb3 functionality to tighten up typing. For example:

from web3 import Web3, AsyncWeb3

w3 = Web3(Web3.HTTPProvider(<provider.url>))
async_w3 = AsyncWeb3(AsyncWeb3.AsyncHTTPProvider(<provider.url>))

dict to AttributeDict conversion moved to middleware

Eth module data returned as key-value pairs was previously automatically converted to an AttributeDict by result formatters, which could cause problems with typing. This conversion has been moved to a default attrdict_middleware where it can be easily removed if necessary. See the Eth module docs for more detail.

Other Misc Changes

  • InfuraKeyNotFound exception has been changed to InfuraProjectIdNotFound

  • SolidityError has been removed in favor of ContractLogicError

  • When a method is unavailable from a node provider (i.e. a response error code of -32601 is returned), a MethodUnavailable error is now raised instead of ValueError

  • Logs’ data field was previously formatted with to_ascii_if_bytes, now formatted to HexBytes

  • Receipts’ type field was previously not formatted, now formatted with to_integer_if_hex

Removals

  • Removed unused IBAN module

  • Removed WEB3_INFURA_API_KEY environment variable in favor of WEB3_INFURA_PROJECT_ID

  • Removed Kovan auto provider

  • Removed deprecated sha3 and soliditySha3 methods in favor of keccak and solidityKeccak

  • Remove Parity Module and References

Other notable changes

  • The ipfshttpclient library is now opt-in via a web3 install extra. This only affects the ethpm ipfs backends, which rely on the library.