httpx2

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Summary

HTTPX2 is a next-generation HTTP client library for Python, continuing HTTPX's legacy with added features like HTTP/2 support and async APIs, now maintained by Pydantic.

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pydantic/httpx2

Source: https://github.com/pydantic/httpx2

HTTPX2

A next-generation HTTP client for Python.

Test Suite Package version Join Slack

HTTPX2 is a fully featured HTTP client library for Python. It includes an integrated command line client, has support for both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, and provides both sync and async APIs.

HTTPX2 is a continuation of the wonderful work started by @lovelydinosaur and the broader HTTPX community. We’re enormously grateful for everything that has gone into HTTPX over the years - it has been a foundational piece of the modern Python ecosystem, and this project would not exist without it.

With HTTPX itself seeing limited activity recently, Pydantic is picking up stewardship under the HTTPX2 name so that users have a reliably maintained path forward - including timely security updates for a library that sits in the critical path of so many production systems. Our aim is to honour the original project’s design, keep it stable for everyone relying on it, and continue evolving it carefully. Thank you to @lovelydinosaur and every past contributor for laying such a strong foundation. 💙

Install HTTPX2 using pip:

pip install httpx2

Now, let’s get started:

>>> import httpx2
>>> r = httpx2.get('https://www.example.org/')
>>> r
<Response [200 OK]>
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.headers['content-type']
'text/html; charset=UTF-8'
>>> r.text
'<!doctype html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<title>Example Domain</title>...'

Or, using the command-line client.

pip install 'httpx2[cli]'  # The command line client is an optional dependency.

Which now allows us to use HTTPX2 directly from the command-line:

httpx2 --help

Features

HTTPX2 builds on the well-established usability of requests, and gives you:

Plus all the standard features of requests…

  • International Domains and URLs
  • Keep-Alive & Connection Pooling
  • Sessions with Cookie Persistence
  • Browser-style SSL Verification
  • Basic/Digest Authentication
  • Elegant Key/Value Cookies
  • Automatic Decompression
  • Automatic Content Decoding
  • Unicode Response Bodies
  • Multipart File Uploads
  • HTTP(S) Proxy Support
  • Connection Timeouts
  • Streaming Downloads
  • .netrc Support
  • Chunked Requests

Installation

Install with pip:

pip install httpx2

Or, to include the optional HTTP/2 support, use:

pip install httpx2[http2]

Documentation

Project documentation is available at https://httpx2.pydantic.dev/.

For a run-through of all the basics, head over to the QuickStart.

For more advanced topics, see the Advanced Usage section, the async support section, or the HTTP/2 section.

The Developer Interface provides a comprehensive API reference.

To find out about tools that integrate with HTTPX, see Third Party Packages.

Observability with Pydantic Logfire

Install Logfire with HTTPX instrumentation support:

pip install 'logfire[httpx]'

HTTPX2 works out of the box with Pydantic Logfire, our observability platform built on OpenTelemetry. One line instruments every request, giving you traces, timings, and status codes with no other changes:

import logfire
import httpx2

logfire.configure()
logfire.instrument_httpx()

httpx2.get("https://pydantic.dev/")

This works the same way for explicit httpx2.Client() and httpx2.AsyncClient() instances, and you can scope instrumentation to a single client by passing it in: logfire.instrument_httpx(client). Pass capture_all=True to also record headers and bodies. See the Logfire HTTPX docs for the full set of options.

Contribute

If you want to contribute with HTTPX2 check out the Contributing Guide to learn how to start.

Dependencies

The HTTPX2 project relies on these excellent libraries:

  • httpcore2 - The underlying transport implementation for httpx2.
    • h11 - HTTP/1.1 support.
  • anyio - Structured concurrency primitives, used to support both asyncio and trio.
  • truststore - SSL verification using the operating system’s trust store.
  • idna - Internationalized domain name support.

As well as these optional installs:

  • h2 - HTTP/2 support. (Optional, with httpx2[http2])
  • socksio - SOCKS proxy support. (Optional, with httpx2[socks])
  • rich - Rich terminal support. (Optional, with httpx2[cli])
  • click - Command line client support. (Optional, with httpx2[cli])
  • brotli or brotlicffi - Decoding for “brotli” compressed responses. (Optional, with httpx2[brotli])
  • backports.zstd - Decoding for “zstd” compressed responses on Python 3.13 and below. (Optional, with httpx2[zstd]. On Python 3.14+, zstd is supported via the stdlib compression.zstd module when it is available, and the httpx2[zstd] extra installs nothing.)

A huge amount of credit is due to requests for the API layout that much of this work follows, as well as to urllib3 for plenty of design inspiration around the lower-level networking details.

HTTPX2 is BSD licensed code.
Designed & crafted with care.
— 🦋 —

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