reel

THIS IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS

Rust-based HTTP implementation for Emacs.

Reel strives to be non-interactive HTTP library for Emacs.

Rationale

Emacs’s built-in url.el library is insufficient for a lot of uses and arcane to use, and other popular libraries either depend on url.el or curl.

My goal is to implement an HTTP client in Emacs that has a similar API to other programming languages. It shouldn’t use buffers excessively and it shouldn’t depend on the global environment for behavior.

Features

• DONE Basic HTTP requests
• TODO Multipart form requests with file data
• TODO Send requests through a proxy
• TODO Cookies and sessions
• TODO Asynchronous requests
• TODO Streaming

Goals

• Basic synchronous HTTP requests
• REST clients
• REST server

Examples

Reel’s API is roughly based off of JavaScript’s fetch API.

;; GETs "https://example.com" synchronously
(reel "https://example.com")

A reel request returns a reel-response struct, with status, headers, and body slots.

;; makes a POST request with headers
(reel "https://example.com"
      :method "POST"
      :headers '(("Content-Type" . "application/json"))
      :body (json-serialize '(:id 123)))

:body can also be an alist for form submission. Will raise an error if the alist contains anything but strings:

(reel "https://example.com"
      :method "POST"
      :body '(("key" . "value"))