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HTTPX design goals are to be simple and intuitive to use, to not reinvent the wheel, and to be forwards-compatible with the protocols of tomorrow.

It was made in order to provide a ruby http test library that could support both HTTP/2 and HTTP/1 (and its unique features) using the same API. Beyond that, it tried to take the best features of existing ruby HTTP libraries, and avoiding its inconsistencies.

Basic Usage

Make Requests: learn how to make requests
Pass Parameters: learn how to send requests using query, form ("www-form-uriencoded"), raw data, and multipart files in requests
Response Handling: learn how to handle responses from requests

Plugins

HTTPX ships with a plugin system "inherited" from sequel, roda or shrine. It allows for controlled extension of the core functionality, i.e. it can be plugged-in at the instance level.

require "httpx"

# sends request with the "Authentication" header
auth_client = HTTPX.plugin(:authentication)
auth_client.authentication("SECRET-TOKEN").get("http://example.com") #=> ...Authentication: "SECRET-TOKEN"\r\n...

# does NOT send the "Authentication" header
HTTPX.get("http://example.come")

Proxy: learn how to send requests through HTTP, HTTPS, Socks4, Socks4a, Socks5 or SSH proxies.
Authentication: learn how to authenticate requests using HTTP Basic Auth or HTTP Digest Auth.
Follow Redirects: learn how to send requests which follow HTTP 3XX Redirect responses.
Retries: learn how to retry requests.
Cookies: learn how to send Cookies in requests.
Compression: learn how to send requests which accept compressed responses and send compressed request bodies (gzip, deflate, brotli).
Server Push: (HTTP/2 only) learn how to use server push effectively.
H2C Upgrade: (cleartext HTTP/1.1 only) learn how to upgrade an HTTP/1 connection to an HTTP/2 connection.
Multipart Uploads: learn how to upload files using a friendlier API.
Persistent: keep the connection pools alive, increases connection reuse.
Expect: Supports Expect: 100-continue header in requests with a body.
Custom Plugins: learn how to create your custom plugin and extend the API.

Adapters

Faraday: backend for the faraday client library.

Considerations

Error Handling: how you can handle errors when using multiple requests.
DNS Resolvers: how you can choose how to perform DNS resolving.
Timeouts: how you can leverage network timeouts.
Connections: how HTTPX manages connections.
Thread Safety: how to use the library in multiple threads.
Debugging: how to debug and inspect the HTTP interactions.
Why?

Contributing

If you want to contribute, here's what you'll need to know.

Ruby or docker

In order to contribute, you can choose to develop in your machine, or use the docker-compose setup we use for the CI builds.

If you choose to develop locally, you'll have to have ruby installed. It's recommended you use a ruby version manager for this. If you never worked with one, my personal recommendation is to use chruby and ruby-install. You'll also need gcc (or clang) and make installed (some development dependencies require the installation of C-extensions). All test runs will hit publicly available peers (i.e.: nghttp2.org).

If you choose to develop using docker:

# this example is for ruby 2.7 specifically, there's a compose file for each supported version
> docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose-ruby-2.7.yml run --entrypoint sh httpx
> test/support/ci/build.sh

and you're good to go. All tests will run against the containerized services.

assert

When writing tests, you have to focus on minimalism. If you look at the test suite, only one assertion method from minitest is being used in most cases: assert. There will be exceptions, but you'll be asked to use assert whenever possible.

Integration test first

All HTTP features have an integration test using httpbin (with a few exceptions). If you want to add a specific HTTP feature, test it using an endpoint from httpbin which can validate it.