ureq

A simple, safe HTTP client.

Ureq's first priority is being easy for you to use. It's great for anyone who wants a low-overhead HTTP client that just gets the job done. Works very well with HTTP APIs. Its features include cookies, JSON, HTTP proxies, HTTPS, and charset decoding.

Ureq is in pure Rust for safety and ease of understanding. It avoids using unsafe directly. It uses blocking I/O instead of async I/O, because that keeps the API simple and and keeps dependencies to a minimum. For TLS, ureq uses rustls.

Version 2.0.0 was released recently and changed some APIs. See the changelog for details.

Usage

In its simplest form, ureq looks like this:

fn main() -> Result<(), ureq::Error> {
    let body: String = ureq::get("http://example.com")
        .set("Example-Header", "header value")
        .call()?
        .into_string()?;
    Ok(())
}

For more involved tasks, you'll want to create an Agent. An Agent holds a connection pool for reuse, and a cookie store if you use the "cookies" feature. An Agent can be cheaply cloned due to an internal Arc and all clones of an Agent share state among each other. Creating an Agent also allows setting options like the TLS configuration.

  use ureq::{Agent, AgentBuilder};
  use std::time::Duration;

  let agent: Agent = ureq::AgentBuilder::new()
      .timeout_read(Duration::from_secs(5))
      .timeout_write(Duration::from_secs(5))
      .build();
  let body: String = agent.get("http://example.com/page")
      .call()?
      .into_string()?;

  // Reuses the connection from previous request.
  let response: String = agent.put("http://example.com/upload")
      .set("Authorization", "example-token")
      .call()?
      .into_string()?;

Ureq supports sending and receiving json, if you enable the "json" feature:

  // Requires the `json` feature enabled.
  let resp: String = ureq::post("http://myapi.example.com/ingest")
      .set("X-My-Header", "Secret")
      .send_json(ureq::json!({
          "name": "martin",
          "rust": true
      }))?
      .into_string()?;

Error handling

ureq returns errors via Result<T, ureq::Error>. That includes I/O errors, protocol errors, and status code errors (when the server responded 4xx or 5xx)

use ureq::Error;

match ureq::get("http://mypage.example.com/").call() {
    Ok(response) => { /* it worked */},
    Err(Error::Status(code, response)) => {
        /* the server returned an unexpected status
           code (such as 400, 500 etc) */
    }
    Err(_) => { /* some kind of io/transport error */ }
}

More details on the Error type.

Features

To enable a minimal dependency tree, some features are off by default. You can control them when including ureq as a dependency.

ureq = { version = "*", features = ["json", "charset"] }

tls enables https. This is enabled by default.
cookies enables cookies.
json enables Response::into_json() and Request::send_json() via serde_json.
charset enables interpreting the charset part of the Content-Type header (e.g. Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1). Without this, the library defaults to Rust's built in utf-8.
socks-proxy enables proxy config using the socks:// and socks5:// prefix.

Plain requests

Most standard methods (GET, POST, PUT etc), are supported as functions from the top of the library (get(), post(), put(), etc).

These top level http method functions create a Request instance which follows a build pattern. The builders are finished using:

.call() without a request body.
.send() with a request body as Read (chunked encoding support for non-known sized readers).
.send_string() body as string.
.send_bytes() body as bytes.
.send_form() key-value pairs as application/x-www-form-urlencoded.

JSON

By enabling the ureq = { version = "*", features = ["json"] } feature, the library supports serde json.

request.send_json() send body as serde json.
response.into_json() transform response to json.

Content-Length and Transfer-Encoding

The library will send a Content-Length header on requests with bodies of known size, in other words, those sent with .send_string(), .send_bytes(), .send_form(), or .send_json(). If you send a request body with .send(), which takes a Read of unknown size, ureq will send Transfer-Encoding: chunked, and encode the body accordingly. Bodyless requests (GETs and HEADs) are sent with .call() and ureq adds neither a Content-Length nor a Transfer-Encoding header.

If you set your own Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding header before sending the body, ureq will respect that header by not overriding it, and by encoding the body or not, as indicated by the headers you set.

let resp = ureq::post("http://my-server.com/ingest")
    .set("Transfer-Encoding", "chunked")
    .send_string("Hello world");

Character encoding

By enabling the ureq = { version = "*", features = ["charset"] } feature, the library supports sending/receiving other character sets than utf-8.

For response.into_string() we read the header Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 and if it contains a charset specification, we try to decode the body using that encoding. In the absence of, or failing to interpret the charset, we fall back on utf-8.

Similarly when using request.send_string(), we first check if the user has set a ; charset=<whatwg charset> and attempt to encode the request body using that.

Proxying

ureq supports two kinds of proxies, HTTP CONNECT and SOCKS5, the former is always available while the latter must be enabled using the feature ureq = { version = "*", features = ["socks-proxy"] }.

Proxies settings are configured on an Agent (using [AgentBuilder]). All request sent through the agent will be proxied.

Example using HTTP CONNECT

fn proxy_example_1() -> std::result::Result<(), ureq::Error> {
    // Configure an http connect proxy. Notice we could have used
    // the http:// prefix here (it's optional).
    let proxy = ureq::Proxy::new("user:password@cool.proxy:9090")?;
    let agent = ureq::AgentBuilder::new()
        .proxy(proxy)
        .build();

    // This is proxied.
    let resp = agent.get("http://cool.server").call()?;
    Ok(())
}

Example using SOCKS5

fn proxy_example_2() -> std::result::Result<(), ureq::Error> {
    // Configure a SOCKS proxy.
    let proxy = ureq::Proxy::new("socks5://user:password@cool.proxy:9090")?;
    let agent = ureq::AgentBuilder::new()
        .proxy(proxy)
        .build();

    // This is proxied.
    let resp = agent.get("http://cool.server").call()?;
    Ok(())
}

Blocking I/O for simplicity

Ureq uses blocking I/O rather than Rust's newer asynchronous (async) I/O. Async I/O allows serving many concurrent requests without high costs in memory and OS threads. But it comes at a cost in complexity. Async programs need to pull in a runtime (usually async-std or tokio). They also need async variants of any method that might block, and of any method that might call another method that might block. That means async programs usually have a lot of dependencies - which adds to compile times, and increases risk.

The costs of async are worth paying, if you're writing an HTTP server that must serve many many clients with minimal overhead. However, for HTTP clients, we believe that the cost is usually not worth paying. The low-cost alternative to async I/O is blocking I/O, which has a different price: it requires an OS thread per concurrent request. However, that price is usually not high: most HTTP clients make requests sequentially, or with low concurrency.

That's why ureq uses blocking I/O and plans to stay that way. Other HTTP clients offer both an async API and a blocking API, but we want to offer a blocking API without pulling in all the dependencies required by an async API.

Ureq is inspired by other great HTTP clients like superagent and the fetch API.

If ureq is not what you're looking for, check out these other Rust HTTP clients: surf, reqwest, isahc, attohttpc, actix-web, and hyper.

smihica / ureq