Crate chttp

The practical HTTP client that is fun to use.

Sending requests

Sending requests is as easy as calling a single function. Let's make a simple GET request to an example website:

use chttp::prelude::*;

let mut response = chttp::get("https://example.org")?;
println!("{}", response.text()?);

By default, sending a request will wait for the response, up until the response headers are received. The returned response struct includes the response body as an open stream implementing Read.

Sending a POST request is also easy, and takes an additional argument for the request body:

let response = chttp::post("https://httpbin.org/post", "make me a salad")?;

cHTTP provides several other simple functions for common HTTP request types:

chttp::put("https://httpbin.org/put", "have a salad")?;
chttp::head("https://httpbin.org/get")?;
chttp::delete("https://httpbin.org/delete")?;

Custom requests

cHTTP is not limited to canned HTTP verbs; you can customize requests by creating your own Request object and then sending that.

use chttp::prelude::*;

let response = Request::post("https://httpbin.org/post")
    .header("Content-Type", "application/json")
    .body(r#"{
        "speed": "fast",
        "cool_name": true
    }"#)?
    .send()?;

Request configuration

There are a number of options involved in request execution that can be configured for a request, such as timeouts, proxies, and other connection and protocol configuration. These can be customized by using extension methods provided by the RequestBuilderExt trait:

use chttp::prelude::*;
use std::time::Duration;

let response = Request::get("https://httpbin.org/get")
    .timeout(Duration::from_secs(5))
    .body(())?
    .send()?;

Configuration related to sending requests is stored inside the request struct using http::Extensions.

Custom clients

The free-standing functions for sending request delegate to a shared client instance that is lazily instantiated with the default options. You can also create custom client instances of your own, which allows you to set default options for all requests and group related connections together. Each client has its own connection pool and event loop, so separating certain requests into separate clients can ensure that they are isolated from each other.

See the documentation for HttpClient and HttpClientBuilder for more details on creating custom clients.

Asynchronous API and execution

Requests are always executed asynchronously under the hood. This allows a single client to execute a large number of requests concurrently with minimal overhead.

If you are writing an asynchronous application, you can additionally benefit from the async nature of the client by using the asynchronous methods available to prevent blocking threads in your code. All request methods have an asynchronous variant that ends with _async in the name. Here is our first example rewritten to use async/await syntax (nightly Rust only):

use chttp::prelude::*;

let mut response = chttp::get_async("https://httpbin.org/get").await?;
println!("{}", response.text_async().await?);

Logging

cHTTP logs quite a bit of useful information at various levels using the log crate.

If you set the log level to Trace for the chttp::wire target, cHTTP will also log all incoming and outgoing data while in flight. This may come in handy if you are debugging code and need to see the exact data being sent to the server and being received.

Re-exports

pub use http;

Modules

config	Definition of all client and request configuration options.
cookies	Cookie state management.
middleware	HTTP client middleware API.
prelude	A "prelude" for importing common cHTTP types.

Structs

Body	Contains the body of an HTTP request or response.
HttpClient	An HTTP client for making requests.
HttpClientBuilder	An HTTP client builder, capable of creating custom HttpClient instances with customized behavior.
ResponseFuture	A future for a request being executed.

Enums

Error

All possible types of errors that can be returned from cHTTP.

Functions

delete	Send a DELETE request to the given URI.
delete_async	Send a DELETE request to the given URI asynchronously.
get	Send a GET request to the given URI.
get_async	Send a GET request to the given URI asynchronously.
head	Send a HEAD request to the given URI.
head_async	Send a HEAD request to the given URI asynchronously.
post	Send a POST request to the given URI with a given request body.
post_async	Send a POST request to the given URI asynchronously with a given request body.
put	Send a PUT request to the given URI with a given request body.
put_async	Send a PUT request to the given URI asynchronously with a given request body.
send	Send an HTTP request and return the HTTP response.
send_async	Send an HTTP request and return the HTTP response asynchronously.
version	Gets a human-readable string with the version number of cHTTP and its dependencies.