HTTP Core

Do one thing, and do it well.

The HTTP Core package provides a minimal low-level HTTP client, which does one thing only. Sending HTTP requests.

It does not provide any high level model abstractions over the API, does not handle redirects, multipart uploads, building authentication headers, transparent HTTP caching, URL parsing, session cookie handling, content or charset decoding, handling JSON, environment based configuration defaults, or any of that Jazz.

Some things HTTP Core does do:

Sending HTTP requests.
Thread-safe / task-safe connection pooling.
HTTP(S) proxy & SOCKS proxy support.
Supports HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.
Provides both sync and async interfaces.
Async backend support for asyncio and trio.

Requirements

Python 3.8+

Installation

For HTTP/1.1 only support, install with:

$ pip install httpcore

There are also a number of optional extras available...

$ pip install httpcore['asyncio,trio,http2,socks']

Sending requests

Send an HTTP request:

import httpcore

response = httpcore.request("GET", "https://www.example.com/")

print(response)
# <Response [200]>
print(response.status)
# 200
print(response.headers)
# [(b'Accept-Ranges', b'bytes'), (b'Age', b'557328'), (b'Cache-Control', b'max-age=604800'), ...]
print(response.content)
# b'<!doctype html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<title>Example Domain</title>\n\n<meta charset="utf-8"/>\n ...'

The top-level httpcore.request() function is provided for convenience. In practice whenever you're working with httpcore you'll want to use the connection pooling functionality that it provides.

import httpcore

http = httpcore.ConnectionPool()
response = http.request("GET", "https://www.example.com/")

Once you're ready to get going, head over to the documentation.

Motivation

You probably don't want to be using HTTP Core directly. It might make sense if you're writing something like a proxy service in Python, and you just want something at the lowest possible level, but more typically you'll want to use a higher level client library, such as httpx.

The motivation for httpcore is:

To provide a reusable low-level client library, that other packages can then build on top of.
To provide a really clear interface split between the networking code and client logic, so that each is easier to understand and reason about in isolation.