curl-impersonatevshttr
Curl-impersonate is a special build of libcurl and cURL HTTP client that impersonates the four major browsers:
- Google Chrome
- Microsoft Edge
- Safari
- Firefox
Curl-impersonate achieves this by patching TLS and HTTP fingerprints to be identical to that of one of these real browsers.
Unlike other HTTP clients curl-impersonate can bypass TSL and HTTP fingerprinting and detection techniques though it does not implement anything for Javascript fingerprint or bypass.
The aim of httr is to provide a wrapper for the curl package, customised to the demands of modern web APIs.
Key features:
- Functions for the most important http verbs: GET(), HEAD(), PATCH(), PUT(), DELETE() and POST().
- Automatic connection sharing across requests to the same website (by default, curl handles are managed automatically), cookies are maintained across requests, and a up-to-date root-level SSL certificate store is used.
- Requests return a standard reponse object that captures the http status line, headers and body, along with other useful information.
- Response content is available with content() as a raw vector (as = "raw"), a character vector (as = "text"), or parsed into an R object (as = "parsed"), currently for html, xml, json, png and jpeg.
- You can convert http errors into R errors with stop_for_status().
- Config functions make it easier to modify the request in common ways: set_cookies(), add_headers(), authenticate(), use_proxy(), verbose(), timeout(), content_type(), accept(), progress().
- Support for OAuth 1.0 and 2.0 with oauth1.0_token() and oauth2.0_token(). The demo directory has eight OAuth demos: four for 1.0 (twitter, vimeo, withings and yahoo) and four for 2.0 (facebook, github, google, linkedin). OAuth credentials are automatically cached within a project.
Highlights
bypasshttp2tls-fingerprinthttp-fingerprintlow-level
Example Use
curl-impersonate installs itself under `curl_` terminal commands like `curl_chrome116`:
To use it in HTTP client libraries that use `libcurl` replace curl path with one of these.
To use it in python directly see curl-cffi Python package
$ curl_chrome116 https://www.wikipedia.org
library(httr)
# GET requests:
resp <- GET("http://httpbin.org/get")
status_code(resp) # status code
headers(resp) # headers
str(content(resp)) # body
# POST requests:
# Form encoded
resp <- POST(url, body = body, encode = "form")
# Multipart encoded
resp <- POST(url, body = body, encode = "multipart")
# JSON encoded
resp <- POST(url, body = body, encode = "json")
# setting cookies:
resp <- GET("http://httpbin.org/cookies", set_cookies("MeWant" = "cookies"))
content(r)$cookies # get response cookies