C++ Requests: Curl for People

Announcements

The cpr project will have a new maintainer: Tim Stack. He has graciously agreed to donate his time to keep the project healthy and grow it. For those waiting on their PRs and issues to be resolved, I appreciate your patience and know that you will be in good hands moving forward.

TLDR

C++ Requests is a simple wrapper around libcurl inspired by the excellent Python Requests project.

Despite its name, libcurl's easy interface is anything but, and making mistakes misusing it is a common source of error and frustration. Using the more expressive language facilities of C++11, this library captures the essence of making network calls into a few concise idioms.

Here's a quick GET request:

#include <cpr/cpr.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    auto r = cpr::Get(cpr::Url{"https://api.github.com/repos/whoshuu/cpr/contributors"},
                      cpr::Authentication{"user", "pass"},
                      cpr::Parameters{{"anon", "true"}, {"key", "value"}});
    r.status_code;                  // 200
    r.header["content-type"];       // application/json; charset=utf-8
    r.text;                         // JSON text string
}

And here's less functional, more complicated code, without cpr.

Documentation

You can find the latest documentation here. It's a work in progress, but it should give you a better idea of how to use the library than the tests currently do.

Features

C++ Requests currently supports:

Custom headers
Url encoded parameters
Url encoded POST values
Multipart form POST upload
File POST upload
Basic authentication
Digest authentication
Connection and request timeout specification
Timeout for low speed connection
Asynchronous requests
🍪 support!
Proxy support
Callback interface
PUT methods
DELETE methods
HEAD methods
OPTIONS methods
PATCH methods

Planned

Support for the following will be forthcoming (in rough order of implementation priority):

and much more!

Usage

For just getting this library up and running, I highly recommend forking the example project. It's configured with the minimum CMake magic and boilerplate needed to start playing around with networked applications.

If you already have a project you need to integrate C++ Requests with, the primary way is to use git submodules. Add this repository as a submodule of your root repository:

git submodule add git@github.com:whoshuu/cpr.git
OR 
git submodule add https://github.com/whoshuu/cpr.git

git submodule update --init --recursive

Next, add this subdirectory to your CMakeLists.txt before declaring any targets that might use it:

add_subdirectory(cpr)

This will produce two important CMake variables, CPR_INCLUDE_DIRS and CPR_LIBRARIES, which you'll use in the typical way:

include_directories(${CPR_INCLUDE_DIRS})
target_link_libraries(your_target_name ${CPR_LIBRARIES})

and that should do it! Using the submodule method of integrating C++ Requests, there's no need to handle libcurl yourself, all of those dependencies are taken care of for you.

Requirements

The only explicit requirements are:

a C++11 compatible compiler such as Clang or GCC. The minimum required version of GCC is unknown, so if anyone has trouble building this library with a specific version of GCC, do let me know
curl and its development libraries

Building cpr - Using vcpkg

You can download and install cpr using the vcpkg dependency manager:

git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git
cd vcpkg
./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh
./vcpkg integrate install
./vcpkg install cpr

The cpr port in vcpkg is kept up to date by Microsoft team members and community contributors. If the version is out of date, please create an issue or pull request on the vcpkg repository.

wangdf62 / cpr