Skip to content

httr2

httr2 (pronounced hitter2) is a ground-up rewrite of httr that provides a pipeable API with an explicit request object that solves more problems felt by packages that wrap APIs (e.g. built-in rate-limiting, retries, OAuth, secure secrets, and more).

Installation

You can install httr2 from CRAN with:

Usage

To use httr2, start by creating a request:

library(httr2)

req <- request("https://r-project.org")
req
#> <httr2_request>
#> GET https://r-project.org
#> Body: empty

You can tailor this request with the req_ family of functions:

# Add custom headers
req |> req_headers("Accept" = "application/json")
#> <httr2_request>
#> GET https://r-project.org
#> Headers:
#> • Accept: 'application/json'
#> Body: empty

# Add a body, turning it into a POST
req |> req_body_json(list(x = 1, y = 2))
#> <httr2_request>
#> POST https://r-project.org
#> Body: json encoded data

# Modify the path in the url
req |> req_url_path(path = "path/to/my/file")
#> <httr2_request>
#> GET https://r-project.org/path/to/my/file
#> Body: empty

# Automatically retry if the request fails
req |> req_retry(max_tries = 5)
#> <httr2_request>
#> GET https://r-project.org
#> Body: empty
#> Policies:
#> • retry_max_tries: 5
#> • retry_on_failure: FALSE

# Change the HTTP method
req |> req_method("PATCH")
#> <httr2_request>
#> PATCH https://r-project.org
#> Body: empty

And see exactly what httr2 will send to the server with req_dry_run():

req |> req_dry_run()
#> GET / HTTP/1.1
#> Host: r-project.org
#> User-Agent: httr2/1.0.3.9000 r-curl/5.2.2 libcurl/8.6.0
#> Accept: */*
#> Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip

Use req_perform() to perform the request, retrieving a response:

resp <- req_perform(req)
resp
#> <httr2_response>
#> GET https://www.r-project.org/
#> Status: 200 OK
#> Content-Type: text/html
#> Body: In memory (6951 bytes)

The resp_ functions help you extract various useful components of the response:

resp |> resp_content_type()
#> [1] "text/html"
resp |> resp_status_desc()
#> [1] "OK"
resp |> resp_body_html()
#> {html_document}
#> <html lang="en">
#> [1] <head>\n<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8 ...
#> [2] <body>\n    <div class="container page">\n      <div class="row">\n       ...

Major differences to httr

  • You can now create and modify a request without performing it. This means that there’s now a single function to perform the request and fetch the result: req_perform(). req_perform() replaces httr::GET(), httr::POST(), httr::DELETE(), and more.

  • HTTP errors are automatically converted into R errors. Use req_error() to override the defaults (which turn all 4xx and 5xx responses into errors) or to add additional details to the error message.

  • You can automatically retry if the request fails or encounters a transient HTTP error (e.g. a 429 rate limit request). req_retry() defines the maximum number of retries, which errors are transient, and how long to wait between tries.

  • OAuth support has been totally overhauled to directly support many more flows and to make it much easier to both customise the built-in flows and to create your own.

  • You can manage secrets (often needed for testing) with secret_encrypt() and friends. You can obfuscate mildly confidential data with obfuscate(), preventing it from being scraped from published code.

  • You can automatically cache all cacheable results with req_cache(). Relatively few API responses are cacheable, but when they are it typically makes a big difference.

Acknowledgements

httr2 wouldn’t be possible without curl, openssl, jsonlite, and jose, which are all maintained by Jeroen Ooms. A big thanks also go to Jenny Bryan and Craig Citro who have given me much useful feedback on both the design of the internals and the user facing API.