reqwest VS surf

Compare reqwest vs surf and see what are their differences.

reqwest

An easy and powerful Rust HTTP Client (by seanmonstar)

surf

Fast and friendly HTTP client framework for async Rust (by http-rs)
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reqwest surf
57 4
9,130 1,446
- 0.8%
8.9 0.0
3 days ago 8 months ago
Rust Rust
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

reqwest

Posts with mentions or reviews of reqwest. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-18.
  • The Linux Kernel Prepares for Rust 1.77 Upgrade
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2024
    > If you are equally picky and constrain yourself to parts of the ecosystem which care about binary size, you still have more options and can avoid size issues.

    What's an example of this for, say, libcurl? On my system it has a tiny number of recursive dependencies, around a dozen. [0] Furthermore if I want to write a C program that uses libcurl I have to download zero bytes of data ... because it's a shared library that is already installed on my system, since so many programs already use it.

    I don't really know the appropriate comparison for Rust. reqwest seems roughly comparable, but it's an HTTP client library, and not a general purpose network client like curl. Obviously curl can do a lot more. Even the list of direct dependencies for reqwest is quite long [1], and it's built on top of another http library [2] that has its own long list of dependencies, a list that includes tokio, no small library itself.

    In terms of final binary size, the installed size of the curl package on my system, which includes both the command line tool and development dependencies for libcurl, is 1875.03 KiB.

    [0] I'm excluding the dependency on the ca-certificates package, since this only provides the certificate chain for TLS and lots of programs rely on it.

    [1] https://crates.io/crates/reqwest/0.11.24/dependencies

    [2] https://crates.io/crates/hyper/0.14.28/dependencies

  • What We Need Instead of "Web Components"
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Dec 2023
  • ReductStore 1.6.0 has been released with new license and client SDK for Rust
    3 projects | dev.to | 15 Aug 2023
    ReductStore was rewritten from C++ to Rust a few months ago. We are delighted to be part of the Rust community and have taken a new step towards Rust with the Client SDK. The SDK is powered by reqwest and enables asynchronous integration of the database into Rust applications:
  • Rust dependency woes
    2 projects | /r/rust | 20 Jun 2023
    From what I could turn up when googling the specific error lines (here), it has something to do with the crate mio not having support for WASM, but I don’t understand what’s being said on this thread.
  • Using Auth0 with Tauri
    1 project | dev.to | 7 May 2023
    You can use the tauri-plugin-deep-link crate to register your app as a protocol handler. After you get your code, you can exchange it for an auth token in the same manner as the Electron guide, but for Rust you can use reqwest for the HTTP call.
  • Authentication system using rust (actix-web) and sveltekit - Automated testing
    3 projects | dev.to | 6 May 2023
    When starting out, we made some design decisions at the backend. The decision will allow us to independently test the service without interfering with the real application using a term called integration testing. We'll utilize two "dev" packages: reqwest and fake. Dev dependencies only get introduced into your application in development or during testing. In production, they are not included:
  • How can I save a blob:<url> to my hard disk? Im currently using Rust to scrape a website, however I dont even know if that is possible
    1 project | /r/rust | 22 Apr 2023
    It's possible, you will want to use crates like https://docs.rs/reqwest/ to download the page and https://docs.rs/scraper/ to extract elements from the page.
  • Becoming Rustacean:Awesome Free Online Resources to Learn Rust Programming
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Apr 2023
    Rust allows me to mainly only run the application to confirm things work from a business perspective.

    For people starting out building stuff in rust - understand that there is a distinction of async code and libraries and can lead to confusing compiler errors if you don't realize there is a distinction. It's simple in hindsight but did cause me to waste hours barking up the wrong trees at first. Other wise just learn about `match` and Result/Option types asap, they're fundamental.

    https://github.com/http-rs/tide tide is great to create an http server / routes

    https://github.com/djc/askama I use this to template out HTML and it checks all my boxes, dynamic data, passing in functions, control flow.

    https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx sql interface for a variety of backend, async safe.

    https://github.com/seanmonstar/reqwest http client to make requests

    Rust is amazing, don't let the initial few speed bumps discourage you - building real things with rust is no more challenging today than any other modern language stack.

  • This Month in hyper: March 2023
    3 projects | /r/rust | 7 Apr 2023
    Is there any this month in reqwest? I would like to show my interest in https://github.com/seanmonstar/reqwest/issues/39
  • Reqwest cookies feature not working
    1 project | /r/rust | 3 Apr 2023
    The relevant issue seems to be https://github.com/seanmonstar/reqwest/pull/1753

surf

Posts with mentions or reviews of surf. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-01-09.
  • Hey Rustaceans! Got a question? Ask here (2/2023)!
    12 projects | /r/rust | 9 Jan 2023
  • New crate: asserhttp
    7 projects | /r/rust | 23 Nov 2021
    It is a simple trait providing many asserters. This trait is then implemented for many http clients: reqwest, surf, isahc, hyper and actix.
  • Building static Rust binaries for Linux
    6 projects | dev.to | 17 Oct 2021
    This indicates curl, zlib, openssl, and libnghttp2 as well as a bunch of WASM-related things are being dynamically linked into my executable. To resolve this, I looked at the build features exposed by surf and found that it selects the "curl_client" feature by default, which can be turned off and replaced with "h1-client-rustls" which uses an HTTP client backed by rustls and async-std and no dynamically linked libraries. Enabling this build feature removed all -sys dependencies from androidx-release-watcher, allowing me to build static executables of it.
  • http client facade library?
    3 projects | /r/rust | 5 Feb 2021
    https://github.com/http-rs/surf provides an abstraction over several backends, but forces you into async and async-std, and the abstractions it provides are very limited anyway.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing reqwest and surf you can also consider the following projects:

hyper - An HTTP library for Rust

rust-http-clients-smoke-test

curl-rust - Rust bindings to libcurl

ureq - A simple, safe HTTP client

isahc - The practical HTTP client that is fun to use.

Rocket - A web framework for Rust.

asserhttp - Fluent http assertions

actix-web - Actix Web is a powerful, pragmatic, and extremely fast web framework for Rust.

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

tokio - A runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. Provides I/O, networking, scheduling, timers, ...

ripgrep - ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore