Tools for Working with URLs and HTTP


Keywords
api, curl, http, r
License
MIT

Documentation

httr

Status

Lifecycle: superseded

httr is superseded: only changes necessary to keep it on CRAN will be made. We recommend using httr2 instead.


CRAN status R-CMD-check Codecov test coverage

The aim of httr is to provide a wrapper for the curl package, customised to the demands of modern web APIs.

Key features:

  • Functions for the most important http verbs: GET(), HEAD(), PATCH(), PUT(), DELETE() and POST().

  • Automatic connection sharing across requests to the same website (by default, curl handles are managed automatically), cookies are maintained across requests, and a up-to-date root-level SSL certificate store is used.

  • Requests return a standard reponse object that captures the http status line, headers and body, along with other useful information.

    • Response content is available with content() as a raw vector (as = "raw"), a character vector (as = "text"), or parsed into an R object (as = "parsed"), currently for html, xml, json, png and jpeg.

    • You can convert http errors into R errors with stop_for_status().

  • Config functions make it easier to modify the request in common ways: set_cookies(), add_headers(), authenticate(), use_proxy(), verbose(), timeout(), content_type(), accept(), progress().

  • Support for OAuth 1.0 and 2.0 with oauth1.0_token() and oauth2.0_token(). The demo directory has eight OAuth demos: four for 1.0 (twitter, vimeo, withings and yahoo) and four for 2.0 (facebook, github, google, linkedin). OAuth credentials are automatically cached within a project.

httr wouldn't be possible without the hard work of the authors of curl and libcurl. Thanks! httr is inspired by http libraries in other languages, such as Resty, Requests and httparty.

Installation

To get the current released version from CRAN:

install.packages("httr")

To get the current development version from github:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("r-lib/httr")

Code of Conduct

Please note that the httr project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.