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Top 23 HTTP Open-Source Projects
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Project mention: Spine v1: Stop Making Claude Rediscover Your Codebase Every Time You Open a Repo | dev.to | 2026-05-02
git clone https://github.com/axios/axios.git cd axios
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Project mention: The $847/year Developer Tool Stack That Replaced My $4,200 SaaS Subscriptions | dev.to | 2026-03-24
Hoppscotch is open-source, runs in the browser, and does everything I used Postman for. Collections, environments, WebSocket testing — all there.
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Project mention: I got tired of setting up SSL for every side project, so I made a 60-second Docker deploy kit | dev.to | 2026-05-19
The secret is Caddy. Unlike Nginx, Caddy handles SSL automatically — it requests certificates from Let's Encrypt and renews them without any configuration. The entire reverse proxy config is 3 lines:
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Project mention: Some secret management belongs in your HTTP proxy | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-21
all languages also seem to have packages around providing cert bundles which get used directly (e.g., certifi [3]), which does cause some pain
[1] https://github.com/rustls/rustls-native-certs/issues/16#issu...
[2] https://github.com/psf/requests/issues/2899
[3] https://pypi.org/project/certifi/
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mitmproxy
An interactive TLS-capable intercepting HTTP proxy for penetration testers and software developers.
Project mention: How to audit what your IDE extension actually sends to the cloud | dev.to | 2026-05-22mitmproxy is the gold standard here. It's free, open source, and Python-scriptable.
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libcurl
A command line tool and library for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, MQTTS, POP3, POP3S, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET, TFTP, WS and WSS. libcurl offers a myriad of powerful features
bagder merged a fix to curl in response to my report: https://github.com/curl/curl/commit/b079595f2e903b820a027a68...
Sorry for not believing you initially! I'm very surprised that was in there
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aria2
aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source, cross platform download utility operated in command-line. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent and Metalink.
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wrk (epoll) gcannon (io_uring)
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httpie
🥧 HTTPie CLI — modern, user-friendly command-line HTTP client for the API era. JSON support, colors, sessions, downloads, plugins & more. (by httpie)
httpie is easier to read than curl when testing APIs manually.
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nps
一款轻量级、高性能、功能强大的内网穿透代理服务器。支持tcp、udp、socks5、http等几乎所有流量转发，可用来访问内网网站、本地支付接口调试、ssh访问、远程桌面，内网dns解析、内网socks5代理等等……，并带有功能强大的web管理端。a lightweight, high-performance, powerful intranet penetration proxy server, with a powerful web management terminal. (by ehang-io)
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Not ideal.
This appears to be fixed as of April (at least for Apache). [0].
[0] - https://github.com/nginx/nginx/commit/365694160a85229a7cb006...
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The key to successful caching is understanding your application’s bottlenecks and choosing the right caching strategy for each use case. So before doing any caching or performance improvement, track the bottlenecks using tools like django debug toolbar, django silk. You can also use locust for performance/load testing.
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Not true at all. Swift is a very capable backend language, Apple has open sourced a lot of great libraries to power server software development, and there are projects like Vapor [0] that are used in production.
[0]: https://vapor.codes
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22. request (13.4M weekly downloads)
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Some of it is different, but the basics are still the same and still relevant. Just today I've been working with some of this.
I took a Django app that's behind an Apache server and added cache-control and vary headers using Django view decorators, which had 2 effects:
* Meant I could add mod_cache to the Apache server and have common pages cached and served directly from Apache instead of going back to Django. Load testing with vegeta ( https://github.com/tsenart/vegeta ) shows the server can now handle multiples more simultaneous traffic than it could before.
* Meant users browsers now cache all the CSS/JS. As users move between HTML pages, there is now often only 1 request the browser makes. Good for snappier page loads with less server load.
But yeah, updating especially the sections on public vs private caches with regards to HTTPS would be good.
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gopeed
A fast, modern download manager for HTTP, BitTorrent, Magnet, and ed2k. Cross-platform, built with Golang and Flutter.
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Project mention: Go vs Rust: the only backend language debate that actually matters in 2026 | dev.to | 2026-05-14
The broader ecosystem is settled too. Gin and Chi for HTTP routing, sqlc for type-safe queries, Wire for dependency injection if that’s your thing. The compiler errors are readable. Onboarding a new engineer onto a Go codebase takes days, not weeks.
NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 7 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source HTTP projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | axios | 109,090 |
| 2 | Hoppscotch | 79,438 |
| 3 | Caddy | 73,224 |
| 4 | trackerslist | 54,051 |
| 5 | requests | 54,033 |
| 6 | mitmproxy | 43,808 |
| 7 | libcurl | 42,065 |
| 8 | Dubbo | 41,516 |
| 9 | aria2 | 41,104 |
| 10 | wrk | 40,164 |
| 11 | httpie | 37,683 |
| 12 | nps | 34,065 |
| 13 | Nginx | 30,595 |
| 14 | locust | 27,871 |
| 15 | postgrest | 27,201 |
| 16 | Vapor | 26,105 |
| 17 | window.fetch polyfill | 25,985 |
| 18 | kratos | 25,711 |
| 19 | request | 25,566 |
| 20 | Vegeta | 25,060 |
| 21 | gopeed | 24,742 |
| 22 | Guzzle | 23,449 |
| 23 | chi | 22,291 |
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