HTTP Kit

A simple, high-performance event-driven HTTP client+server for Clojure

CHANGELOG | API | current Break Version:

[http-kit "2.6.0"]  ; Published by contributors, see CHANGELOG for details (stable)
[http-kit "2.1.19"] ; Legacy, published by @shenfeng

Project status

http-kit's author (@shenfeng) unfortunately hasn't had much time to maintain http-kit recently. To help out I'll be doing basic issue triage, accepting minor/obvious PRs, etc.

A big thank you to the current contributors for keeping the project going! Additional contributors welcome: please ping me if you'd be interested in lending a hand.

See the (unmaintained, outdated) project website for original documentation, examples, benchmarks, etc.

- @ptaoussanis

Features

• Ring compliant: HTTP Kit is an (almost) drop-in replacement for the standard Ring Jetty adapter. So you can use it with all your current libraries (e.g. Compojure) and middleware.

• High performance: Using an event-driven architecture like Nginx, HTTP-kit is very, very fast. It comfortably handles tens of thousands of requests/sec on even midrange hardware. Here is another test about how it stacks up with others.

• High concurrency: It's not only fast, but efficient! Each connection costs nothing but a few kB of memory. RAM usage grows O(n) with connections.

• Clean, simple, small: Written from the ground-up to be lean, the entire client/server is available as a single ~90kB JAR with zero dependencies and ~3k lines of (mostly Java) code.

• Sync or async: Synchronous is simple. Asynchronous is fast & flexible. With HTTP Kit you get the best of both with a simple API that lets you mix & match to best fit your use case.

• WebSockets and Comet: With great out-the-box support for both WebSockets and efficient handling of long-held HTTP requests, realtime web applications are a breeze to write.

Enabling client SNI support (DISABLED BY DEFAULT)

To retain backwards-compatibility with JVMs < 8, http-kit client's SNI support is DISABLED by default.

Common cause of: javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: Received fatal alert: handshake_failure

This default may be changed in a future breaking release. In the meantime, manually enabling support is easy:

  (:require [org.httpkit.sni-client :as sni-client]) ; Needs Java >= 8, http-kit >= 2.4.0-alpha6

  ;; Change default client for your whole application:
  (alter-var-root #'org.httpkit.client/*default-client* (fn [_] sni-client/default-client))

  ;; or temporarily change default client for a particular thread context:
  (binding [org.httpkit.client/*default-client* sni-client/default-client]
    <...>)

See org.httpkit.client/*default-client* docstring for more details.

Unix Domain Sockets (UDSs)

http-kit >= 2.7 supports Unix Domain Sockets for both clients and servers when running on Java >= 16.

To use UDSs, plug in appropriate java.net.SocketAddress and java.nio.channels.SocketChannel constructor fns:

UDS example: client

(require '[org.httpkit.client :as hk-client])

(let [my-uds-path "/tmp/test.sock"
      my-client
      (hk-client/make-client
        {:address-finder  (fn [_uri]     (UnixDomainSocketAddress/of my-uds-path))
         :channel-factory (fn [_address] (SocketChannel/open StandardProtocolFamily/UNIX))})]

  (hk-client/get "http://foobar" {:client my-client}))

UDS example: server

(require '[org.http-kit.server :as hk-server])

(let [my-uds-path "/tmp/test.sock"
      my-server
      (hk-server/run-server my-routes
        {:address-finder  (fn []         (UnixDomainSocketAddress/of my-uds-path))
         :channel-factory (fn [_address] (ServerSocketChannel/open StandardProtocolFamily/UNIX))})]
  <...>
  )

See the make-client and run-server docstrings for more info.

GraalVM Native Image

http-kit server and client are compatible with GraalVM Native Image. See the test-native project which is ran in CI.

Hack locally

http-kit is hacker friendly: zero dependencies, written from the ground-up with only ~3.5k lines of code (including Java).

# Modify as you want, unit tests back you up:
lein test

# May be useful (more info), see `server_test.clj`:
./scripts/start_test_server

# Some numbers on how fast can http-kit's client can run:
lein test :benchmark

Contact & contribution

Please use the GitHub issues page for feature suggestions, bug reports, or general discussions. Current contributors are listed here. The project website is also on GitHub.

License

Copyright © 2012-2023 @shenfeng and contributors. Distributed under the Apache License Version 2.0.