Introduction

HTTPX2

A next-generation HTTP client for Python.

HTTPX2 is a fully featured HTTP client for Python, which provides sync and async APIs, and support for both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.

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:

Terminal

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.

Terminal

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

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

Terminal

httpx2 --help

Features

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

A broadly requests-compatible API.
Standard synchronous interface, but with async support if you need it.
HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 support.
Ability to make requests directly to WSGI applications or ASGI applications.
Strict timeouts everywhere.
Fully type annotated.
100% test coverage.

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

Documentation

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

For more advanced topics, see the Advanced 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 HTTPX2, see Third Party Packages.

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])
wsproto - WebSocket support. (Optional, with httpx2[ws])
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.

Installation

Install with pip:

Terminal

pip install httpx2

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

Terminal

pip install 'httpx2[http2]'

To include the optional brotli and zstandard decoders support, use:

Terminal

pip install 'httpx2[brotli,zstd]'