Reqwest for Rust: Complete Guide with Examples

What is Reqwest and why is it needed?

Reqwest is one of the most popular and convenient libraries for making HTTP requests in Rust. It provides an ergonomic, high-level API built on top of the asynchronous HTTP engine hyper and tokio. If you are writing a web scraper, REST API client, Telegram bot in Rust, or simply want to download a file — Reqwest will be your primary tool.

The library supports both asynchronous (default) and synchronous (blocking) requests, working with JSON, multipart/form-data, cookies, proxies, TLS/SSL, redirects, and much more. Reqwest is designed to be intuitive for developers familiar with the Python library requests or the JavaScript library fetch.

Key features:

• Asynchronous and synchronous HTTP/HTTPS requests (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH, HEAD, OPTIONS)
• Automatic JSON serialization and deserialization (via serde)
• Support for multipart/form-data for file uploads
• Cookie management (Cookie Store)
• Proxy support (HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5)
• Customization of timeouts, headers, User-Agent
• Streaming support for large responses
• Security by default (SSL certificate verification)

Installation

To use Reqwest, you need a Rust project with Cargo.toml. Add the dependency to the [dependencies] section:

[dependencies]reqwest = { version = "0.12", features = ["json", "multipart", "cookies", "socks"] }tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }serde = { version = "1", features = ["derive"] }serde_json = "1"

Explanation of features:

• json — enables JSON serialization/deserialization support via serde.
• multipart — for sending multipart/form-data.
• cookies — for automatic cookie management.
• socks — for SOCKS5 proxy support.
• If you only need a synchronous (blocking) client, add the blocking feature.

For synchronous use (without async), you can add it like this:

reqwest = { version = "0.12", features = ["blocking", "json"] }

Quick start with code example

Let's make a simple GET request to a public API and print the result. Create a file main.rs:

use reqwest;use std::error::Error;

#[tokio::main]async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> {    // Execute GET request    let response = reqwest::get("https://api.github.com/repos/rust-lang/rust")        .await?;

    // Check status    if response.status().is_success() {        // Parse response body as JSON (without strict typing)        let body: serde_json::Value = response.json().await?;        println!("Repository name: {}", body["full_name"]);        println!("Description: {}", body["description"].as_str().unwrap_or("No description"));        println!("Stars: {}", body["stargazers_count"]);    } else {        eprintln!("Error: {}", response.status());    }

    Ok(())}

Run it with the command cargo run. You should see information about the Rust repository.

Main methods and functions

1. reqwest::get()

What it does: Performs an HTTP GET request to the specified URL. This is the simplest way to retrieve data. Returns a Response.

Parameters:

• url: impl IntoUrl — a string or URL to which the request is sent.

Example:

let resp = reqwest::get("https://httpbin.org/get"