Rock-req

⭐️⭐️ Ensure your HTTP requests always reach their destination as efficiently as possible! ⭐️⭐️

Tested on Mac, Linux, Windows with NodeJS 16, 18, 19, 20

🔥 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