Reqwest — Ergonomic HTTP Client for Rust

What it is

Reqwest is the most widely used HTTP client library for Rust. It provides a high-level, async-first API for making HTTP requests with automatic JSON serialization via serde, native TLS or rustls, cookie management, proxy support, connection pooling, and redirect handling. It sits on top of hyper for the HTTP layer and tokio for async runtime.

Reqwest targets Rust developers building API clients, web scrapers, microservice integrations, or any application that needs to make HTTP calls. It is the Rust equivalent of Python's requests library.

How it saves time or tokens

Using hyper directly requires manually handling connection management, TLS configuration, body streaming, and response parsing. Reqwest wraps all of this in a clean API. A JSON POST request that would take 20+ lines with hyper takes 3 lines with reqwest. The built-in connection pool reuses TCP connections automatically, improving throughput without extra code.

How to use

1. Add reqwest with JSON support: cargo add reqwest --features json and add tokio: cargo add tokio --features full.
2. Create a reqwest::Client (reuse it across requests for connection pooling).
3. Call .get(), .post(), .json(), etc. and .await the response.

Example

use reqwest;
use serde::Deserialize;

#[derive(Deserialize, Debug)]
struct User {
    login: String,
    id: u64,
    public_repos: u32,
}

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), reqwest::Error> {
    // Simple GET
    let body = reqwest::get('https://httpbin.org/get')
        .await?
        .text()
        .await?;
    println!('Body: {}', &body[..100]);

    // Typed JSON response
    let user: User = reqwest::get('https://api.github.com/users/rust-lang')
        .await?
        .json()
        .await?;
    println!('User: {:?}', user);

    Ok(())
}

Related on TokRepo

• Coding Tools -- Developer libraries and utilities
• Web Scraping Tools -- HTTP clients and scraping frameworks

Common pitfalls

• Creating a new reqwest::Client per request instead of reusing one. Each client creates its own connection pool and TLS sessions, wasting resources.
• Forgetting to enable the json feature flag and getting compile errors when calling .json() on responses.
• Using the blocking client (reqwest::blocking) inside an async runtime, which panics. Use the async API within tokio/async-std contexts.