pyqwest

pyqwest is a Python HTTP client supporting modern HTTP features, based on the Rust library reqwest. It does not reinvent any features of HTTP or sockets, delegating to the excellent reqwest, which uses hyper, for all core functionality while presenting a familiar Pythonic API.

Features

• All features of HTTP, including bidirectional streaming, trailers, and HTTP/3
• Async and sync clients
• The stability and performance of the Rust HTTP client stack
• A fully-typed, Pythonic API - no runtime-checked union types

Installation

pyqwest is published to PyPI and can be installed as normal. We publish wheels for a wide variety of platforms, but if you happen to be using one without prebuilt wheels, it will be built automatically if you have Rust installed.

uv add pyqwest # or pip install

Usage

pyqwest provides the classes Client and SyncClient for async and sync applications respectively. These are ready to use to issue requests, or you can create and pass HTTPTransport or SyncHTTPTransport to configure settings like TLS certificates.

client = pyqwest.Client()

response = await client.get("https://curioswitch.org")
print(len(response.content))

See the API reference for all the APIs available.

Benchmarks

We have some preliminary benchmarks just to understand how the approach works. Note that these are essentially microbenchmarks - almost all real-world usage will be dominated by the server's time and not be significantly affected by the performance of the HTTP client itself.

An example from a macOS laptop, for async (with uvloop) HTTP/2 with no request / response content

test_benchmark_async[pyqwest-0-http-h2]            23.8466 (1.0)       28.1299 (1.0)       25.3533 (1.0)      0.7858 (1.0)       25.2118 (1.0)      0.6631 (1.0)           5;3  39.4427 (1.0)          36           1
test_benchmark_async[httpx_pyqwest-0-http-h2]      60.2672 (2.53)      93.4816 (3.32)      63.5238 (2.51)     8.0387 (10.23)     61.4938 (2.44)     1.5876 (2.39)          1;1  15.7421 (0.40)         16           1
test_benchmark_async[httpx-0-http-h2]             180.1868 (7.56)     195.9454 (6.97)     184.1702 (7.26)     6.2000 (7.89)     181.3329 (7.19)     5.8279 (8.79)          1;1   5.4298 (0.14)          6           1

Note we see no difference in trends with different content sizes. We see in this microbenchmark that pyqwest seems to significantly outperform HTTPX. The pyqwest HTTPX adapter also seems to bring potential performance to projects using HTTPX that do not want to change business logic.

Testing HTTP/1 allows us to also check AIOHTTP

test_benchmark_async[aiohttp-0-http-h1]            16.7938 (1.0)       20.7214 (1.0)       18.1937 (1.0)       0.7742 (1.86)      18.1273 (1.0)       1.0262 (1.90)         10;1  54.9642 (1.0)          38           1
test_benchmark_async[pyqwest-0-http-h1]            20.2705 (1.21)      22.2955 (1.08)      21.2425 (1.17)      0.4158 (1.0)       21.2635 (1.17)      0.5392 (1.0)           6;1  47.0754 (0.86)         31           1
test_benchmark_async[httpx_pyqwest-0-http-h1]      54.8534 (3.27)      88.8888 (4.29)      60.6263 (3.33)      9.7253 (23.39)     56.7566 (3.13)      2.4687 (4.58)          2;3  16.4945 (0.30)         18           1
test_benchmark_async[httpx-0-http-h1]             308.5213 (18.37)    333.9165 (16.11)    320.0622 (17.59)    11.2062 (26.95)    317.3413 (17.51)    20.1658 (37.40)         2;0   3.1244 (0.06)          5           1

AIOHTTP is comfortably the fastest - if only needing async with HTTP/1, it is an excellent HTTP client. pyqwest seems to perform fairly closely here too.

We see the same trend for sync as well (note sync outperforms async likely because the benchmark is CPU, not I/O, bound)

test_benchmark_sync[pyqwest-0-http-h2]           14.3617 (1.0)       16.8924 (1.0)       14.9348 (1.0)       0.4427 (1.0)      14.8650 (1.0)      0.4911 (1.0)          11;2  66.9576 (1.0)          52           1
test_benchmark_sync[httpx_pyqwest-0-http-h2]     52.0353 (3.62)     100.9097 (5.97)      56.7675 (3.80)     12.0905 (27.31)    52.6683 (3.54)     0.8969 (1.83)          2;4  17.6157 (0.26)         19           1
test_benchmark_sync[httpx-0-http-h2]             97.2703 (6.77)     131.0486 (7.76)     101.3821 (6.79)     10.4656 (23.64)    97.8609 (6.58)     0.8371 (1.70)          1;2   9.8637 (0.15)         10           1

As always, performance tends to vary widely based on use cases and environments - it is important to perform your own testing when concerned about performance for your situation.