HTTPX: A Ruby HTTP library for tomorrow... and beyond!
HTTPX is an HTTP client library for the Ruby programming language.
Among its features, it supports:
- HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.x protocol versions
- Concurrent requests by default
- Simple and chainable API (based on HTTP.rb, itself based on Python Requests)
- Proxy Support (HTTP(S), Socks4/4a/5)
- Simple Timeout System
- Lightweight (explicit feature loading)
And among others
- Compression (gzip, deflate, brotli)
- Authentication (Basic Auth, Digest Auth)
- Cookies
- HTTP/2 Server Push
- H2C Upgrade
- Redirect following
How
Here are some simple examples:
HTTPX.get("https://nghttp2.org").to_s #=> "<!DOCT...."
And that's the simplest one there is.
If you want to do some more things with the response, you can get an HTTPX::Response:
response = HTTPX.get("https://nghttp2.org")
puts response.status #=> 200
body = response.body
puts body #=> #<HTTPX::Response ...
You can also send as many requests as you want simultaneously:
page1, page2, page3 = HTTPX.get("https://news.ycombinator.com/news", "https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=2", "https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=3")
Installation
Add this line to your Gemfile:
gem "httpx"
or install it in your system:
> gem install httpx
and then just require it in your program:
require "httpx"
Why Should I care?
In Ruby, HTTP client implementations are a known cheap commodity. Why this one?
Concurrency
This library supports HTTP/2 seamlessly (which means, if the request is secure, and the server support ALPN negotiation AND HTTP/2, the request will be made through HTTP/2). If you pass multiple URIs, and they can utilize the same connection, they will run concurrently in it.
However if the server supports HTTP/1.1, it will try to use HTTP pipelining, falling back to 1 request at a time if the server doesn't support it (if the server support Keep-Alive connections, it will reuse the same connection).
Clean API
HTTPX acknowledges the ease-of-use of the http gem API (itself inspired by python requests library). It therefore aims at reusing the same facade, extending it for the use cases which the http gem doesn't support.
Lightweight
It ships with a plugin system similar to the ones used by sequel, roda or shrine.
It means that it loads the bare minimum to perform requests, and the user has to explicitly load the plugins, in order to get the features he/she needs.
It also means that it ships with the minimum amount of dependencies.
DNS-over-HTTPS
HTTPX ships with custom DNS resolver implementations, including a DNS-over-HTTPS resolver.
Easy to test
The test suite runs against httpbin proxied over nghttp2, so there are no mocking/stubbing false positives. The test suite uses minitest, but its matchers usage is (almost) limited to #assert (assert is all you need).
Supported Rubies
All Rubies greater or equal to 2.1, and always latest JRuby.
Note: This gem is tested against all latest patch versions, i.e. if you're using 2.2.0 and you experience some issue, please test it against 2.2.10 (latest patch version of 2.2) before creating an issue.
Resources
Caveats
ALPN support
HTTPS TLS backend is ruby's own openssl gem.
If your requirement is to run requests over HTTP/2 and TLS, make sure you run a version of the gem which compiles OpenSSL 1.0.2 (Ruby 2.3 and higher are guaranteed to).
JRuby's openssl is based on Bouncy Castle, which is massively outdated and still doesn't implement ALPN. So HTTP/2 over TLS/ALPN negotiation is off until JRuby figures this out.
Known bugs
Doesn't work with ruby 2.4.0 for Windows (see #36).
Contributing
- Discuss your contribution in an issue
- Fork it
- Make your changes, add some test
- Ensure all tests pass (
bundle exec rake test) - Open a Merge Request (that's Pull Request in Github-ish)
- Wait for feedback