pycurlvstyphoeus
PycURL is a Python interface to libcurl, a multi-protocol file transfer library written in C. PycURL allows developers to use a variety of network protocols in their Python programs, including HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, and many more.
PycURL is often used in web scraping, data analysis, and automation tasks, as it allows developers to send and receive data over the internet. It can be used to perform various types of requests, such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE, and can also handle file uploads and downloads, cookies, and redirects.
One of the key features of PycURL is its support for SSL and proxy servers, which allows developers to securely transfer data over the internet and work around any network restrictions. PycURL also supports a wide range of authentication methods, such as Basic, Digest, and NTLM, and allows developers to easily set custom headers and query parameters.
Just like cURL itself, PycURL is also highly configurable and allows for fine-grained control over various aspects of the transfer, such as timeouts, retries, buffer sizes, and verbosity levels. Additionally, PycURL also provides easy access to the underlying libcurl library, which allows developers to access advanced functionality that is not exposed by the PycURL API.
It's important to note that PycURL is a wrapper around the libcurl library and therefore provides the same functionality and performance as libcurl.
Main strengths of PycURL is that it uses cURL which is one of the most feature rich low-level http clients. The downside is that it's a very low-level client (see the examples below) with complex API making use in web scraping very difficult and niche.
Typhoeus is a Ruby library that allows you to make parallel HTTP requests, which can greatly speed up the process of making multiple requests to different servers. It is built on top of the C library libcurl, which is known for its high performance and reliability.
One of the main features of Typhoeus is its ability to make parallel requests. This means that it can send multiple requests at the same time, and wait for all of them to finish before returning the results. This can greatly reduce the time it takes to make multiple requests, as it eliminates the need to wait for each request to complete before sending the next one.
In addition to its parallelism feature, Typhoeus also provides a convenient and easy-to-use Ruby interface for making HTTP requests. It supports all of the common HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) and allows you to set various request options, such as headers, timeouts, and authentication. It also supports streaming responses, which allows you to process large responses piece by piece, rather than loading the entire response into memory at once.
Typhoeus is also supports HTTP/2 protocol which provides faster load times and reduced network usage. It also supports streaming which is an essential feature for large data transfer.
Typhoeus is well-documented, actively maintained, and has a large and active community of users. It is widely used in the Ruby ecosystem and is a popular choice for building high-performance web scraping and data-gathering applications.
Note that Typhoeus can also be used as an adapter in popular alternative package Faraday.
Highlights
Example Use
import pycurl
from io import BytesIO
buf = BytesIO()
headers = BytesIO()
c = pycurl.Curl()
c.setopt(c.HTTP_VERSION, c.CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_0) # set to use http2
# set proxy
c.setopt(c.PROXY, 'http://proxy.example.com:8080')
c.setopt(c.PROXYUSERNAME, 'username')
c.setopt(c.PROXYPASSWORD, 'password')
# make a request
c.setopt(c.URL, 'https://httpbin.org/get')
c.setopt(c.WRITEFUNCTION, buf.write) # where to save response body
c.setopt(c.HEADERFUNCTION, headers.write) # where to save response headers
# to make post request enable POST option:
# c.setopt(c.POST, 1)
# c.setopt(c.POSTFIELDS, 'key1=value1&key2=value2')
c.perform() # send request
# read response
data = buf.getvalue().decode()
headers = headers.getvalue().decode() # headers as a string
headers = dict([h.split(': ') for h in headers.splitlines() if ': ' in h]) # headers as a dict
c.close()
# multiple concurrent requests can be made using CurlMulti object:
# Create a CurlMulti object
multi = pycurl.CurlMulti()
# Set the number of maximum connections
multi.setopt(pycurl.MAXCONNECTS, 5)
# Create a list to store the Curl objects
curls = []
# Add the first request
c1 = pycurl.Curl()
c1.setopt(c1.URL, 'https://httpbin.org/get')
c1.setopt(c1.WRITEFUNCTION, BytesIO().write)
multi.add_handle(c1)
curls.append(c1)
# Add the second request
c2 = pycurl.Curl()
c2.setopt(c2.URL, 'https://httpbin.org/')
c2.setopt(c2.WRITEFUNCTION, BytesIO().write)
multi.add_handle(c2)
curls.append(c2)
# Start the requests
while True:
ret, _ = multi.perform()
if ret != pycurl.E_CALL_MULTI_PERFORM:
break
# Close the connections
for c in curls:
multi.remove_handle(c)
c.close()
# GET request
Typhoeus.get("www.example.com")
# POST request
Typhoeus.post("www.example.com/posts", body: { title: "test post", content: "this is my test"})
# make parallel requests:
# hydra is a request queue manager
hydra = Typhoeus::Hydra.hydra
# create request object
first_request = Typhoeus::Request.new("http://example.com/posts/1")
# add complete callbacks
first_request.on_complete do |response|
# callbacks can queue new requests
third_url = response.body
third_request = Typhoeus::Request.new(third_url)
hydra.queue third_request
end
second_request = Typhoeus::Request.new("http://example.com/posts/2")
# queue requests:
hydra.queue first_request
hydra.queue second_request
hydra.run # this is a blocking call that returns once all requests are complete