valeriytisch / niquests

Requests but with HTTP/3, HTTP/2, Multiplexed Connections, System CAs, Certificate Revocation, DNS over HTTPS / TLS / QUIC or UDP, Async, DNSSEC, and (much) pain removed!

Niquests is a simple, yet elegant, HTTP library. It is a drop-in replacement for Requests, which is under feature freeze.

Niquests, is the “Safest, Fastest¹, Easiest, and Most advanced” Python HTTP Client. Production Ready!

✔️ Try before you switch: See Multiplexed in Action
📖 See why you should switch: Read about 10 reasons why

👆 Look at the feature table comparison against requests, httpx and aiohttp!

Feature	niquests	requests	httpx	aiohttp
HTTP/1.1	✅	✅	✅	✅
HTTP/2	✅	❌	✅2	❌
HTTP/3 over QUIC	✅	❌	❌	❌
Synchronous	✅	✅	✅	❌
Asynchronous	✅	❌	✅	✅
Thread Safe	✅	✅	❌3	N/A4
Task Safe	✅	N/A5	✅	✅
OS Trust Store	✅	❌	❌	❌
Multiplexing	✅	❌	Limited6	❌
DNSSEC	✅7	❌	❌	❌
Customizable DNS Resolution	✅	❌	❌	✅
DNS over HTTPS	✅	❌	❌	❌
DNS over QUIC	✅	❌	❌	❌
DNS over TLS	✅	❌	❌	❌
Multiple DNS Resolver	✅	❌	❌	❌
Network Fine Tuning & Inspect	✅	❌	Limited8	Limited8
Certificate Revocation Protection	✅	❌	❌	❌
Session Persistence	✅	✅	✅	✅
In-memory Certificate CA & mTLS	✅	❌	Limited9	Limited9
SOCKS 4/5 Proxies	✅	✅	✅	❌
HTTP/HTTPS Proxies	✅	✅	✅	✅
TLS-in-TLS Support	✅	✅	✅	✅
Direct HTTP/3 Negotiation	✅10	N/A11	N/A11	N/A11
Happy Eyeballs	✅	❌	❌	✅
Package / SLSA Signed	✅	❌	❌	✅

📈 Look at the performance comparison against them!

Scenario: Fetch a thousand requests using 10 tasks or threads, each with a hundred requests using a single pool of connection.

High-Level APIs

Client	Average Delay to Complete	Notes
requests	987 ms	ThreadPoolExecutor. HTTP/1.1
httpx	735 ms	Asyncio. HTTP/2
niquests	470 ms	Asyncio. HTTP/2

Simplified APIs

Client	Average Delay to Complete	Notes
requests core	643 ms	ThreadPoolExecutor. HTTP/1.1
httpx core	550 ms	Asyncio. HTTP/2
aiohttp	220 ms	Asyncio. HTTP/1.1
niquests core	210 ms	Asyncio. HTTP/2

Did you give up on HTTP/2 due to performance concerns? Think again! Multiplexing and response lazyness open up a wide range of possibilities! Want to learn more about the tests? scripts? reasoning?

Take a deeper look at https://github.com/Ousret/niquests-stats

⚠️ Do the responsible thing with this library and do not attempt DoS remote servers using its abilities.

>>> import niquests
>>> s = niquests.Session(resolver="doh+google://", multiplexed=True)
>>> r = s.get('https://pie.dev/basic-auth/user/pass', auth=('user', 'pass'))
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.headers['content-type']
'application/json; charset=utf8'
>>> r.oheaders.content_type.charset
'utf8'
>>> r.encoding
'utf-8'
>>> r.text
'{"authenticated": true, ...'
>>> r.json()
{'authenticated': True, ...}
>>> r
<Response HTTP/3 [200]>
>>> r.ocsp_verified
True
>>> r.conn_info.established_latency
datetime.timedelta(microseconds=38)

or using async/await!

import niquests
import asyncio

async def main() -> None:
    async with niquests.AsyncSession(resolver="doh+google://") as s:
        r = await s.get('https://pie.dev/basic-auth/user/pass', auth=('user', 'pass'), stream=True)
        print(r)  # Output: <Response HTTP/3 [200]>
        payload = await r.json()
        print(payload)  # Output: {'authenticated': True, ...}

asyncio.run(main())

Niquests allows you to send HTTP requests extremely easily. There’s no need to manually add query strings to your URLs, or to form-encode your PUT & POST data — just use the json method!

✨ Installing Niquests and Supported Versions

Niquests is available on PyPI:

$ python -m pip install niquests

Niquests officially supports Python or PyPy 3.7+.

🚀 Supported Features & Best–Practices

Niquests is ready for the demands of building scalable, robust and reliable HTTP–speaking applications.

• DNS over HTTPS, DNS over QUIC, DNS over TLS, and DNS over UDP
• Automatic Content Decompression and Decoding
• OS truststore by default, no more certifi!
• OCSP Certificate Revocation Verification
• Advanced connection timings inspection
• In-memory certificates (CAs, and mTLS)
• Browser-style TLS/SSL Verification
• Sessions with Cookie Persistence
• Keep-Alive & Connection Pooling
• International Domains and URLs
• Automatic honoring of .netrc
• Basic & Digest Authentication
• Familiar dict–like Cookies
• Network settings fine-tuning
• Object-oriented headers
• Multi-part File Uploads
• Chunked HTTP Requests
• Fully type-annotated!
• SOCKS Proxy Support
• Connection Timeouts
• Streaming Downloads
• HTTP/2 by default
• HTTP/3 over QUIC
• Happy Eyeballs
• Multiplexed!
• Thread-safe!
• DNSSEC!
• Async!

Need something more? Create an issue, we listen.

📝 Why did we pursue this?

For many years now, Requests has been frozen. Being left in a vegetative state and not evolving, this blocked millions of developers from using more advanced features.

We don't have to reinvent the wheel all over again, HTTP client Requests is well established and really pleasant in its usage. We believe that Requests has the most inclusive and developer friendly interfaces. We intend to keep it that way. As long as we can, long live Niquests!

How about a nice refresher with a mere CTRL+H import requests to import niquests as requests ?

💼 For Enterprise

Professional support for Niquests is available as part of the Tidelift Subscription. Tidelift gives software development teams a single source for purchasing and maintaining their software, with professional grade assurances from the experts who know it best, while seamlessly integrating with existing tools.

You may also be interested in unlocking specific advantages (like access to a private issue tracker) by looking at our GitHub sponsor tiers.

---

Niquests is a highly improved HTTP client that is based (forked) on Requests. The previous project original author is Kenneth Reitz and actually left the maintenance of Requests years ago.

Footnotes

1. performance measured when leveraging a multiplexed connection with or without uses of any form of concurrency as of March 2024. The research compared httpx, requests, aiohttp against niquests. See https://github.com/Ousret/niquests-stats ↩

2. while advertised as possible, they refuse to make it the default due to performance issues. as of february 2024 an extra is required to enable it manually. ↩

3. httpx officially claim to be thread safe but recent tests demonstrate otherwise as of february 2024. https://github.com/jawah/niquests/issues/83#issuecomment-1956065258 https://github.com/encode/httpx/issues/3072 https://github.com/encode/httpx/issues/3002 ↩

4. aiohttp has no support for synchronous request. ↩

5. requests has no support for asynchronous request. ↩

6. while the HTTP/2 connection object can handle concurrent requests, you cannot leverage its true potential. ↩

7. enabled when using a custom DNS resolver. ↩

8. they do not expose anything to control network aspects such as IPv4/IPv6 toggles, and timings (e.g. DNS response time, established delay, TLS handshake delay, etc...) and such. ↩ ↩²

9. loading client certificate without file can't be done. ↩ ↩²

10. you must use a custom DNS resolver so that it can preemptively connect using HTTP/3 over QUIC when remote is compatible. ↩

11. they don't support HTTP/3 at all. ↩ ↩² ↩³