PlainHttp 1.1.1

PlainHttp

An easy HTTP client for .NET Core 2.2 with support for serialization, proxies, testing, and more

Features

• Wraps HttpClient and provides a cleaner and easier interface
• Supports any HTTP method
• Per-request timeout with a custom HttpRequestTimeoutException
• Per-request proxy with transparent pooling
• Automatic serialization of objects to JSON/XML/URL encoded
• (no deserialization support)
• Download a file to disk
• Set a response encoding
• Option to disable automatic reading of the response body
• Automatically enabled decompression of GZIP and DEFLATE responses
• Allows to mock requests for unit testing
• Heavily used in production by @botfactoryit to send 4 million requests per day

Why .NET Core 2.2

This library targets .NET Core 2.2 because it requires the PooledConnectionLifetime property on HttpMessageHandler, introduced in .NET Core 2.2. This makes sure that reusing the same HttpClient for a long time doesn't have unintended consequences affecting DNS resolution. This library in fact keeps a pool of HttpClient instances that are never disposed.

In particular, the library keeps:

• One HttpClient per request host
• One HttpClient per proxy

There is currently no mechanism that disposes HttpClient instances that are unused, so if you use a lot of random proxies or many different hostnames, you might get into trouble. This can be easily improved by creating a custom IHttpClientFactory, and then passing the factory to each request through the HttpClientFactory property.

Usage

Full usage instructions are available on GitHub.