🔥 Why?

In most existing libraries (2023):

• Managing reliable retries is difficult, tricky with streams and not battle-tested
• Using multiple forward proxies has several benefits like higher availability and increased bandwidth but Intercepting retries to use another Egress controller between two requests is not possible.
• Many request libraries are heavy: node-fetch, superagent, needle, got, axios, request
• Lightweight alternatives are not as light as they claim due to dependencies (simple-get, tiny-req, puny-req, phin, ...)

⚡️ Rock-req solves these problems with only 150 lines of code and zero dependencies

It also supports many features:

• Follows redirects
• Handles gzip/deflate/brotli responses
• Modify defaults
• Extend and create new instances
• Automatically destroy input/output stream on error and premature close event
• Advanced retries
• URL Rewrite
• Ultra-fast (> 20k req/s)
• Keep Alive by default (3000ms)
• Composable
• Timeouts
• HTTPS / HTTP
• Composes well with npm packages for features like cookies, proxies, form data, & OAuth
• Keep 98% of the simple-get API (fork source)

When the callback is called, the request is 100% finished, even with streams.

🚀 Benchmark Rock-req vs got, axios, node-fetch, phin, simple-get, superagent, ...

Stop using "slow by-default" and "false-light" HTTP request libraries!

| Library | NodeJS 16 | NodeJS 18 | NodeJS 20* | Size deps inc. | | ------------ |--------------:|--------------:| --------------:| --------------:| | rock-req 🙋‍♂️ | 22816 req/s | 21797 req/s | 21964 req/s | 144 LOC | | simple-get | 2937 req/s | 3260 req/s | 21258 req/s | 317 LOC | | axios | 5090 req/s | 4910 req/s | 3196 req/s | 13983 LOC | | got | 2163 req/s | 1762 req/s | 9961 req/s | 9227 LOC | | fetch | 2101 req/s | 2102 req/s | 2020 req/s | 13334 LOC | | request | 2249 req/s | 1869 req/s | 15815 req/s | 46572 LOC | | superagent | 2776 req/s | 2100 req/s | 2895 req/s | 16109 LOC | | phin | 3178 req/s | 1164 req/s | 21299 req/s | 331 LOC | | undici* | 24095 req/s | 24378 req/s | 24191 req/s | 16225 LOC |

NodeJS 20 activates HTTP keep-alive by default, like rock-req

undici is a low-level API, faster alternative to the native NodeJS http module. It is the glass ceiling limit for NodeJS.

rock-req uses only the native NodeJS http module and provides many high-level features, a lot more than phin and simple-get with fewer lines of code.

Tested on Macbook Pro M1 Max

Install

  npm install rock-req

Documentation

The full documentation is here to reduce Node package file size.

Supporters

This packaged in maintained by Carbone:

Thank you Feross Aboukhadijeh, creator of simple-get