request-curl

The goal of this library is to use the request.js syntax/options without using NodeJS's default HTTP Client and instead using cURL to make the requests. Made after spending too long looking for a good HTTP2 supported request client without running into major issues when using proxies or making mass requests such as h2-request or got. Built to help emulate similar browser-similar HTTP(S) requests to browsers without using a CPU/Memory intensive program such as Selenium or Puppeteer.

Supported Features

- [x] Headers
- [x] HTTP1.1/HTTP2
- [x] Cipher suites
- [x] Proxy support
- [x] gzip, deflare & br decompression
- [x] Following redirects
- [x] Max redirects
- [x] SSL support
- [x] Automatically convert body to JSON
- [x] Built in JSON parsing
- [x] Automatic Cookiejar/Cookie sessions through 'tough-cookie'
- [x] Supports path as is and disabling rebuilding path dot sequences (AKA Path traversing) /../
- [X] Support sending JSON body in request
- [x] Ability to disable tcp socket reuse

Headers

Currently header order is not supported by cURL. This isn't really a big issue currently since there's many browsers that don't have specified header orders which you can emulate. Headers follow the same request.js syntax. By default no headers are set.

``javascript
const opts = {
url: 'https://www.httpbin.org/headers'
headers: { // No default headers
'User-agent': 'CurlyRequest/v1',
'Accept': 'application/json'
}
}
`

HTTP2

Curl-request has built in HTTP2 support. This is not enabled by default and must be enabled with the http2: true option.

Proxy Support

Curl-request has one-line proxy support, The same as request.js, it also has authentication support (User/password proxies)

`javascript
const opts = {
url: 'https://www.httpbin.org/headers',
proxy: 'http://username:password@45.212.29.55:3128' // Default false
}
`

Content Decoding

Curl-request has support for br, gzip and deflate compression, This means You can use the same Accept-Encoding headers as Google Chrome whilst being able to decode the response. Also helps save file-transfer size.

You can decode these types of responses using decode: true or gzip: true (The gzip parameter is for fallback support for request.js). Some websites can return invalid content-encoding types which cURL cannot handle throwing a fatal error. You can get the raw response by setting decode: false

Redirects

You can specify whether to follow redirects using the followRedirects key. By default Curl-request will follow 3XX redirects. You can also specify a maximum amount of redirects to follow before exiting the request (Prevent getting stuck in a redirect loop)

`javascript
const opts = {
url: 'https://www.httpbin.org/headers',
followRedirects: false, // Default true
maxRedirects: 5 // Default 10
}
`

SSL

Force strict usage of SSL in the requests.

`javascript
const opts = {
url: 'https://www.httpbin.org/headers',
strictSSL: false, // Default true
}
`

JSON

Automatically convert the response body to a JSON object rather than having to use JSON.parse().

`javascript
const opts = {
url: 'https://www.httpbin.org/headers',
json: true // Default false
}
``