> The problem with httpx as a dependency is that it's currently working towards a 1.0 release which will be full of breaking changes.

The httpx maintainer closed off access to issues and discussions on the repo, has been ignoring PRs, and hasn’t updated it in a half a year.

I don’t think there is any reason to consider httpx as a viable project any more. The Pydantic httpx fork has taken its place.

The issue with httpx is that it has an obnoxious and toxic maintainer.

"I recommended the HTTPX project release their 1.0 as a package called httpx2 instead, but a year later we now have an httpx2 (released by a different maintainer) that keeps the old API"

wtf is going on

So I guess HTTPX2 (https://github.com/pydantic/httpx2) is winning out over HTTPXYZ (https://codeberg.org/httpxyz/httpxyz)? I didn't switch to HTTPXYZ after the fork but have been watching it. (What I did was use urllib.request more and bite the Rust bullet with wreq, https://github.com/0x676e67/wreq-python, where it wasn't enough.)

A bit strange considering "coding is solved".

But seriously, migrating between different libs should be ~free for both Anthropic and OpenAI.

Biggest problem with httpx I see is authors sanity https://github.com/encode/httpx/discussions/3784. I do not even understand what is his problem (too much or too little woke internet?).

[flagged]

The Python community loves confusing versioning.

I mean, obviously Python 2.7 is newer than Python 3.1

I remember swearing I would never migrate to python3 but here we are, I migrated without even feeling it or realizing when (But I do remember django played a big role).

Same! Recently ported some code from httpx -> niquests and the experience has been good, although admittedly the governance of the project seems a little unclear.

I (ok, Qwen 3.7 27B) wrote some benchmarking code to compare throughput, and niquests seems to be substantially more performant for traffic that doesn't need to traverse the public web, e.g. intra cluster service to service communication:

https://gist.github.com/jtbaker/61061d27949ef48ac31e85ff28c2...

uv run scripts/bench_http.py --count 1000 Benchmarking 1000 requests to http://localhost:8000/health (concurrency=16, timeout=30.0s) Date: 2026-08-28T10:18:34.480111

Running httpx... Running httpx2... Running niquests...

Metric httpx httpx2 niquests ------------------------------------------------------- mean 17.8ms 4.6ms 3.3ms min 3.2ms 1.5ms 1.2ms max 632.4ms 11.1ms 10.8ms p50 15.9ms 4.2ms 3.0ms p95 32.4ms 7.4ms 5.6ms p99 52.1ms 8.5ms 8.4ms total 1.15s 315.5ms 239.7ms throughput 869.2 req/s 3170.0 req/s 4171.1 req/s

Winner: niquests (4.8x faster by wall clock)

I opened an issue some time ago about them monkey patching urllib3, it was fixed than but I now see the issue has been outright deleted. Oh and now I see there is a URLLIB3_NO_OVERRIDE thing... I would not recommend this project.

httpx2 is fork maintained by pydantic which are trustworthy and resourcefull maintainers.

Why not pyreqwest?

https://github.com/encode/httpx/discussions/3784

> I've closed off access to issues and discussions.

> I don't want to continue allowing an online environment with such an absurdly skewed gender representation. I find it intensely unwelcoming, and it's not reflective of the type of working environments I value.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1rl5kuq/anyone_know...

You no longer need to jump through the hoops in order to support your own root CA

This could be a breaking change (for some corporate network environments).

Ugh. certifi the most annoying thing ever. It snuck into numerous python dependencies, never made anything better, and confuses all the junior devs when their venvs/containers etc can't access internal CA signed resources. Probably have explained what to do over 9,000 times. And for what? "To provide updated root CAs". Meh. I don't need daily CA trust store updates. If your CA roots are that new, I want nothing to do with it. Cert issuers (cough sectigo and their amateur hour CA root rotation recently, not even Mozilla had it).

what's `nb` ?

HTTPX2 isn't about the protocol version, it's the name of a python library to make http requests.

But yes, it doesn't support HTTP3. Here's the related issue: https://github.com/pydantic/httpx2/issues/92

because its over QUIC, which is different enough to be a pain.

Not that there is anything wrong with QUIC, at least its built by someone who knows what they are doing, unlike HTTP2

Why would you assume that we have to move from techX to techX+1? If I release http4 would you assume that you have to migrate to http4 at some point?

Async. And it comes with WSGI and ASGI transport adapters [1], which are amazing for testing/debugging with the client and server in a single process. And I personally find the httpx API is much cleaner and more composable, but ymmv.

[1] https://www.python-httpx.org/advanced/transports/#wsgi-trans...

Requests has been dead for over a decade. It doesn’t support HTTP/2, it doesn’t support HTTP/3, it doesn’t support async, and they ignore security vulnerabilities for months.

Nobody should use requests. If you are still using it, the quickest way to get off it is to switch to niquests, which is actively developed, supports all the things I mentioned above, and API-compatible with requests - you can just do `import niquests as requests` for an instant upgrade.

https://niquests.readthedocs.io/

You probably want to use pretty much anything over requests for performance reasons.

Since it clearly intends to satisfy the async use case, I wish you'd've phrased this as "over aiohttp".

async

I'd second this question. And I really mean that in a sincere way. Why is the choice of a random HTTP library in an SDK such an engaging topic of discussion here? Is there some context I'm missing?

When I first read the title, I assumed this was some fancy new protocol that extends HTTP or something. But it's just about an SDK switching one transitive dependency with a fork? And arguably one that should just have its functionality be part of stdlib?

Seems like the point is that the httpx maintainer is a bad maintainer.

The maintainers of requests have made it pretty clear that they consider that package feature complete, and have not showed interest in adding native async support to the core.