HTTP client for Rust: top libraries

HTTP client for Rust: overview of the best libraries

Rust is a systems programming language that has gained popularity due to its safety, performance, and lack of a garbage collector. When developing web applications, microservices, or tools for working with APIs, it is often necessary to send HTTP requests. In this article, we will look at the best libraries for working with HTTP in Rust, their features, performance, and usage examples.

1. reqwest — the most popular HTTP client

reqwest is a high-level, convenient HTTP client for Rust, built on top of hyper. It supports both synchronous and asynchronous requests, automatic JSON handling, cookies, proxies, and TLS.

Key features:

Support for async/await (requires tokio or async-std)
Automatic JSON serialization/deserialization (via serde)
Working with forms, multipart, files
Cookie and session management
Support for HTTP/2 and TLS (via native-tls or rustls)

Example GET request with reqwest:

use reqwest;

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

    let body = response.text().await?;    println!("Response: {}", body);    Ok(())}

Example POST request with JSON:

use reqwest;use serde_json::json;

#[tokio::main]async fn main() -> Result<(), reqwest::Error> {    let client = reqwest::Client::new();    let payload = json!({"title": "New task", "completed": false});

    let response = client        .post("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos")        .json(&payload)        .send()        .await?;

    println!("Status: {}", response.status());    Ok(())}

2. ureq — minimalistic and fast

ureq is a lightweight synchronous HTTP client with no dependencies on an async runtime. It is ideal for scripts, CLI utilities, and projects where asynchrony is not needed.

Features:

Clean synchronous API
Minimal number of dependencies
Support for JSON, multipart, cookies
Built-in TLS support (via native-tls or rustls)

Example with ureq:

use ureq;

fn main() -> Result<(), ureq::Error> {    let response = ureq::get("https://httpbin.org/get")        .set("Accept", "application/json")        .call()?;

    let body: serde_json::Value = response.into_json()?;    println!("JSON: {}", body);    Ok(())}

3. hyper — low-level foundation

hyper is an asynchronous HTTP library on which many other clients are built (including reqwest). It gives full control over requests but requires more code and understanding of async concepts.

When to choose hyper:

Maximum performance is needed
Fine-tuning of connections is required
You are building your own HTTP server or proxy

Example of a simple GET request with hyper:

use hyper::{Client, Uri};use hyper::body::HttpBody;

#[tokio::main]async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {    let client = Client::new();    let uri: Uri = "http://httpbin.org/ip".parse()?;    let mut response = client.get(uri).await?;

    while let Some(chunk) = response.body_mut().data().await {        let data = chunk?;        println!("{}", String::from_utf8_lossy(&data));    }    Ok(())}