Migrating to HTTPX2 (github.com)

190 pointsby tosh17 hours ago81 comments

simonw 17 hours ago

Anthropic made the same change a few weeks after OpenAI did: https://github.com/anthropics/anthropic-sdk-python/releases/...

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 httpx2 project is essentially a fork that promises not to break the existing API, which makes it a more stable dependency to build against.

I wrote a pretty long comment about my concerns for the breaking 1.0 version last year - https://github.com/encode/httpx/discussions/3344#discussionc... - in that comment 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.

rolymath 16 hours ago

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).

Longwelwind 16 hours ago

Isn't that whole point of semantic release?

Minors and hotfixes allow you to release a new version for an older release (like if you released 3.7 but you found a bug present in 3.4, you can release 3.4.1 which would be newer than 3.7), making it possible to have multiple supported versions at the same time.

chme 16 hours ago

That isn't confusing at all, if you know how maintained stable releases work.

Happens with the Linux kernel as well.

yard2010 16 hours ago

Tangibly related, did you know that odd versions of node don't get LTS, I found it odd at first

hk__2 15 hours ago

There are a lot of large projects where X.1 is newer than Y.0. You release a new major version for breaking changes, but you backport security changes to previous major releases as well.

paulddraper 15 hours ago

That’s probably the worst example you could have chosen.

You shouldn’t assume anything about relative date of 2.7 and 3.1.

jubilanti 14 hours ago

Just read https://semver.org/

networked 16 hours ago

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.)

simonw 16 hours ago

httpx2 is sponsored by Pydantic and has involvement from the new maintainer of Starlette, so it's off to a very strong start.

fnord123 13 hours ago

Kludex is a really good dev

glitch253 12 hours ago

He's a freaking GOD

kelvinjps10 15 hours ago

in their README >Important

We started this fork because there was no activity on HTTPX, a very popular Python HTTP library.

A few weeks later, Pydantic started their own fork called HTTPX2. We decided to embrace this and support HTTPX2. We're upstreaming our fixes to HTTPX2 and in our opinion it should be the "blessed" fork. Pydantic can make this more successful than we ever can.

Thanks for all your support!

Sander & Michiel

NewJazz 14 hours ago

It is too bad because httpxyz is absolutely the better name.

superze 16 hours ago

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

portly 16 hours ago

What happened?

beanjuiceII 15 hours ago

was probably chewing bubble gum on the wrong sidewalk

jatora 15 hours ago

this made me laugh even though i dont think i even get it. can you explain this please lol

beanjuiceII 15 hours ago

people think other people are 'toxic' for the silliest of things most times; and this person is saying some maintainer is toxic to put it out there but provides no information as to why.. so i figured my context is as good as theirs

nozzlegear 12 hours ago

> people think other people are 'toxic' for the silliest of things most times

Do they?

t098i3 14 hours ago

Read for yourself: https://github.com/encode/httpx/discussions/3784

They also effectively killed off MkDocs: https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/discussions/3677

tescreal 13 hours ago

That's easily the strangest self-destruction I've ever seen. "Skewed gender representation"? Not sure how that matters or what the intended effect of salting the earth here was.

mock-possum 13 hours ago

I feel like that hardly answers anything

tonyhart7 15 hours ago

"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

ClikeX 15 hours ago

Open Source disputes.

krzyk 15 hours ago

A bit strange considering "coding is solved".

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

simonw 15 hours ago

A migration document like this one is how you get that ~free upgrade - it's something you can point an agent at.

Aurornis 15 hours ago

> 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.

simonw 15 hours ago

HTTPX stable hasn't had a release since December 2024, but there have been two dev releases of the 1.0 branch this month (after a gap since September 2025.)

Unfortunately that 1.0 work is happening in a private repository.

https://pypi.org/project/httpx/#history

Aurornis 15 hours ago

> Unfortunately that 1.0 work is happening in a private repository.

That’s even more reason to consider it non-viable.

There is no reason to encourage or support this type of behavior in a project. It is their right to do with it as they please, but I’m not interested in a project that functions like this. The forks are continuing to operate like true community projects.

jgalt212 14 hours ago

Maybe they don't feel like sharing their work with the AI bot scrapers until the work is complete.

tredre3 12 hours ago

That is a legitimate feeling, but to spite the trillion dollars company he also hurts thousands of regular developers.

He doesn't owe those developers anything, of course, but likewise they do not owe him loyalty and thus since an open fork exists, his project will die.

Killing the project is also his right, but people also have a right to be upset by his passive aggressive behavior. Just announce that you're shutting down the project and move on, don't waste our time.

Aurornis 11 hours ago

For the users of the project, the reasons don’t matter. They’re free to do as they want for any reason they choose.

Users of the project can (and have been) moving to forks that are operated as open, community projects in the continued spirit of the project’s original intention.

For what it’s worth, the maintainer has stated their reasons and they are not related to AI or scraper bots.

jgalt212 11 hours ago

> 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.

I have no idea what that means other this person might not be the easier to work with, or get along with.

shakna an hour ago

Probably means the attacks on them, mentioning gender, were increasing.

Some people get spam. Some people get spam about vulnerabilities that don't exist. And some people get threats.

giov4 11 hours ago

unbelievable, how can a single person affect negatively FOSS so much?

I mean really, closing repos? excluding maintainers? committing only on private repos?

This type of behavior should be moderated and banned from any FOSS activity to avoid exactly this situation of becoming a liability.

I've never seen a open source project page without a github link or a git clone ref like this https://www.encode.io/hx/ it is so ridiculous, wasn't that stuff on github? and isn't it anyway there due to over 1k forks?

what's the advantage of having this behavior? I see it only damaging towards the person, the project and the community.

trallnag 10 hours ago

Maybe mental health issues? We aren't entitled to indefinite maintenance of free software

mmerickel 8 hours ago

This level of entitlement is the reason that FOSS has a maintenance / support epidemic. Maintainers don't owe you anything. They put the work in, not you.

jklehm 14 hours ago

Wonder if they evaluated httpx2 vs niquests: https://github.com/jawah/niquests

awoimbee 14 hours ago

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.

jtbaker 14 hours ago

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)

londons_explore 17 hours ago

There seems to be a bunch of downsides mentioned...

But what are the upsides of this change?

ddorian43 17 hours ago

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

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

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

philipallstar 17 hours ago

It's like that time I started a primary school and then closed it because I hated that the overwhelming majority of employees were women.

porridgeraisin 16 hours ago

This has happened in many packages contributed to by this person. Mkdocs e.g

sunaookami 15 hours ago

Oh boy, no wonder MkDocs became an absolute shit-show that fucked everyone over... https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/discussions/4077#discussion...

giov4 14 hours ago

unbelievable, how can a single person affect negatively FOSS so much?

I mean really, closing repos? excluding maintainers? committing only on private repos?

This type of behavior should be moderated and banned from any FOSS activity to avoid exactly this situation of becoming a liability.

what's the advantage of having this behaviour? I see it only damaging towards the person, the project and the community.

solox3 16 hours ago

Did this move improve the ratio of gender representation in the software development community?

dgellow 16 hours ago

That’s fair, good for the maintainer to consider his personal values with regards to projects he wants to spend his time on

kova12 6 hours ago

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

i574n 12 hours ago

A network error occurred. Please check your connection and try again. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

yeah nice engineering clowns

delduca 13 hours ago

Why this is in the frontpage?

bilalq 11 hours ago

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?

tosh 17 hours ago

nb: operating system TLS trust store is used now (instead of certifi)

hmokiguess 17 hours ago

what's `nb` ?

tosh 17 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nota_bene

hmokiguess 17 hours ago

Thank you! :)

zx8080 17 hours ago

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

skullone 5 hours ago

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).

fsuts 15 hours ago

Why is everyone so slow to move to http3?

KaiserPro 14 hours ago

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

tankenmate 14 hours ago

that's not really much of an argument, almost all reasonable libraries wrap the functionality.and if a provider doesn't want to support http3 then the library will fallback, and then the laggards should pay the slow tax.

KaiserPro 9 hours ago

No as in the infra between you and the end user is less developed.

Nobody is going to get fired for using http1.1

if you move to http3 and a bunch of clients cant use your site, then you're gonna get yelled at.

tredre3 12 hours ago

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

TZubiri 11 hours ago

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?

ushakov 13 hours ago

we have recently switched from httpx for the same reason but instead went with the Rust-based pyqwest (runs on Hyper) it has also a drop-in httpx-compatible transport so migration was easy and also it supports http2 trailers

https://pyqwest.dev

sirfz 8 hours ago

Why not pyreqwest?

ironqcold 15 hours ago

Oh, well... It was bound to happen eventually. I suppose there must be some advantages to such a solution.

KaiserPro 14 hours ago

Why would you want to use HTTPX2 over say requests?

oersted 13 hours ago

async

imp0cat 10 hours ago

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

12_throw_away 5 hours ago

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...

deathanatos 3 hours ago

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

shay_ker 11 hours ago

i assume this is largely about the cybersecurity blitz, to ensure hot-path code is secure?

karpetrosyan 12 hours ago

Better migrate to https://zapros.dev from httpx maintainer

simlevesque 12 hours ago

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

zanie 3 hours ago

That project looks owned by https://github.com/karpetrosyan who has contributed to httpx but is not the owner / maintainer in question

ZeroCool2u 15 hours ago

The requests packages fundamental API is good enough and is now maintained by the PSF. I don't understand why OpenAI and Anthropic don't just throw some $$$ to the PSF for focused improvements and expansion of it.

awildfivreld 14 hours ago

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.

TZubiri 11 hours ago

requests is great and all, but you can just use sockets and send raw http strings. Don't treat it like some impenetrable huge OS project.

Unless OpenAI deprecates the HTTP endpoint, you can pretty much ignore the whole SDK packages.