mechanizevshttpclient
Mechanize is a Ruby library for automating interaction with websites. It automatically stores and sends cookies, follows redirects, and can submit forms — making it behave like a web browser without needing an actual browser engine.
Key features include:
- Automatic cookie management Stores cookies received from servers and sends them back on subsequent requests, maintaining session state across multiple pages.
- Form handling Can find, fill in, and submit HTML forms programmatically. Supports text inputs, selects, checkboxes, radio buttons, and file uploads.
- Link following Navigate through pages by clicking links using their text content, CSS selectors, or href patterns.
- History and back/forward Maintains a browsing history, allowing you to go back and forward through visited pages.
- HTTP authentication Supports basic and digest HTTP authentication.
- Proxy support Can route requests through HTTP proxies.
- Redirect handling Automatically follows HTTP redirects (configurable).
Mechanize is one of the oldest and most established web interaction libraries in Ruby. It is best suited for scraping traditional server-rendered websites with forms and multi-page workflows. For JavaScript-heavy sites, a browser automation tool like Selenium or Playwright is recommended instead.
HTTPClient is a Ruby gem that provides a simple and flexible interface for making HTTP requests. It's a full-featured HTTP client library with support for cookies, redirects, proxy, and more. It's built on top of the libwww-perl library, which is a widely-used, robust and well-documented library.
Features:
- methods like GET/HEAD/POST/* via HTTP/1.1.
- HTTPS(SSL), Cookies, proxy, authentication(Digest, NTLM, Basic), etc.
- asynchronous HTTP request, streaming HTTP request.
- debug mode CLI.
- by contrast with net/http in standard distribution;
- Cookies support
- MT-safe
- streaming POST (POST with File/IO)
- Digest auth
- Negotiate/NTLM auth for WWW-Authenticate (requires net/ntlm module; rubyntlm gem)
- NTLM auth for Proxy-Authenticate (requires 'win32/sspi' module; rubysspi gem)
- extensible with filter interface
- you don't have to care HTTP/1.1 persistent connection (httpclient cares instead of you)