bangboo

A truly synchronous HTTP/1.1 client for Rust, with an API modeled after reqwest::blocking. Unlike reqwest::blocking (which runs a tokio runtime on a background thread), bangboo is built directly on std::net::TcpStream, with no async runtime anywhere.

Installation

Add it to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
bangboo = "0.2"

TLS (via rustls) and charset-aware text decoding are enabled by default. To build without them:

bangboo = { version = "0.2", default-features = false }

Features

Feature	Default	What it adds
tls	yes	HTTPS via rustls, and the tls configuration module
charset	yes	charset-aware Response::text and text_with_charset
native-roots	no	validate against the OS certificate store instead of the bundled roots
cookies	no	cookie store, Set-Cookie handling, Response::cookies
gzip, deflate, brotli, zstd	no	transparent response body decompression
multipart	no	multipart/form-data bodies

Proxies (HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS4/5, plus the *_proxy environment variables), DNS overrides, custom root certificates, mutual TLS and the usual TCP socket options are always available.

Usage

For a single request, use the get shortcut:

let body = bangboo::get("https://www.rust-lang.org")?.text()?;
println!("{body}");

If you plan to make multiple requests, create a Client and reuse it to benefit from keep-alive connection pooling:

let client = bangboo::Client::new();
let res = client
    .post("http://httpbin.org/post")
    .body("the exact body that is sent")
    .send()?;

To send JSON, pass any serde::Serialize value to json; it also sets the Content-Type: application/json header:

let res = client
    .post("http://httpbin.org/post")
    .json(&serde_json::json!({ "lang": "rust" }))
    .send()?;

To receive JSON, Response::json deserializes the response body into any serde::Deserialize type:

let json: serde_json::Value = bangboo::get("http://httpbin.org/json")?.json()?;
println!("{}", json["slideshow"]["title"]);

Response implements std::io::Read, so bodies can be streamed instead of buffered:

let mut res = bangboo::get("https://www.rust-lang.org")?;
let mut file = std::fs::File::create("page.html")?;
res.copy_to(&mut file)?;

Differences from reqwest::blocking

bangboo implements only HTTP/1.1 and 1.0. Everything in reqwest's blocking API that exists because of its async internals or requires HTTP/2+ is out of scope: http2_*, http3_*, and tower connector layers. Retry behavior is not configurable, though an idempotent request on a stale pooled connection is still retried once.

License

MIT