The aim of httr is to provide a wrapper for RCurl that is less configurable but customised to the demands of modern web APIs.

Key features:

• functions for the most important http verbs: GET, HEAD, PATCH, PUT, DELETE and POST.

• automatic connection sharing across requests to the same website (by default, curl handles are managed automatically), cookies are maintained across requests, and the standard root-level SSL certificate store is used.

• a request object which captures the body of the request along with http status code, cookies, headers, timings and other useful information.

  • response content is available with content() as a raw vector (as = "raw"), a character vector (as = "text"), or parsed into an R object (as = "parsed"), currently for html, xml, json, png and jpeg).

  • convert http errors into R errors with stop_for_status

• wrapper functions for the most common configuration options: set_cookies, add_headers, authenticate, use_proxy, verbose, timeout, content_type, accept.

• url parsing (with parse_url) and modification (with modify_url)

• support for OAuth 1.0 and 2.0 with oauth1.0_token() and oauth2.0_token(). The demos directory has six demos of using OAuth: two for 1.0 (twitter and vimeo) and four for 2.0 (facebook, github, google, linkedin). OAuth credentials are automatically cached for each project.

httr wouldn't be possible without the hard work of the authors of RCurl and Curl. Thanks! httr is inspired by http libraries in other languages, such as Resty, Requests and httparty.

To get the current released version from CRAN:

install.packages("httr")

To get the current development version from github:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("hadley/httr")