What My Project Does

pyreqwest is a high-performance HTTP client for Python that wraps highly used Rust crates (like reqwest) and exposes an ergonomic, fully type-annotated Python API. Async and sync clients, automatic decompression/decoding, middlewares, streaming, pooling, mocking, and more.

Target Audience

Developers pushing high concurrency and throughput (backend services, scraping, data ingestion).

Test heavy projects needing clean HTTP mocking or ASGI-app integrations for testing.

Projects requiring different types of HTTP usage (eg sync/async). This supports large amount of different use-cases. No need to use many different Python HTTP dependencies.

Comparison

See here

vs httpx: hugely faster, more robust HTTP/2 support (httpx is in a neglected state and suffering from huge perf issues)

vs urllib: much faster, HTTP/2 support, more ergonomic with type-safety

vs aiohttp: faster, HTTP/2 support, better ergonomics and testing capabilities

vs writing Rust yourself: Zero boilerplate; Pythonic type-safe builder APIs

Not ideal if you need a pure Python solution where you can step through internal HTTP logic or get deep stack traces. Also < 3.11 / alternative interpreters are not supported.

Features

• Async + sync clients (shared design)
• Fully implemented in Rust, including JSON, headers, cookies, URL handling
• HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 (HTTP/3 when upstream stabilizes)
• Connection pooling, streaming request/response bodies
• Automatic decompression (zstd, gzip, brotli, deflate) & charset detection
• Middleware system + pluggable JSON serializer
• Mocking utilities (including ASGI app hookup)
• Redirects, proxies, timeouts, auth (Basic, Bearer), cookie store
• Multipart forms
• No unsafe, no C extensions, free threading
• Fully type hinted

Happy to get feedback, benchmarks, or edge case reports. Install with: uv add pyreqwest (or your preferred tool).