HTTP Client

HTTP Client

EntropyNetworking provides a high-performance, asynchronous HTTP client built on top of libcurl. It supports HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, automatic connection pooling, and request multiplexing.

Basic Usage

The HttpClient interface is straightforward.

// 1. Create client (thread-safe, reusable)
HttpClient client;

// 2. Prepare request
HttpRequest req;
req.method = HttpMethod::GET;
req.url = "https://api.example.com/data";
req.headers.add("Authorization", "Bearer token");

// 3. Execute (blocking)
HttpResponse resp = client.execute(req);

if (resp.statusCode == 200) {
    // Process resp.body (std::vector<uint8_t>)
}

Streaming Requests

For large files, use executeStream to process data incrementally without loading the entire response into memory.

StreamOptions opts;
opts.bufferBytes = 1024 * 1024; // 1MB buffer

auto stream = client.executeStream(req, opts);

std::vector<uint8_t> buffer(4096);
while (!stream.isDone()) {
    size_t bytesRead = stream.read(buffer.data(), buffer.size());
    if (bytesRead > 0) {
        // Write to disk or process chunk
    }
}

Features

• Connection Pooling: Keeps connections alive to reuse SSL handshakes.
• Thread Safety: A single HttpClient instance can be shared across multiple threads.
• Proxy Support: Automatically respects HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY environment variables.
• Compression: Automatically handles GZIP/Brotli decompression.