curl/docs/HYPER.md
Jacob Hoffman-Andrews b9b50f3193
hyper: temporarily remove HTTP/2 support
The current design of the Hyper integration requires rebuilding the
Hyper clientconn for each request. However, building the clientconn
requires resending the HTTP/2 connection preface, which is incorrect
from a protocol perspective. That in turn causes servers to send GOAWAY
frames, effectively degrading performance to "no connection reuse" in
the best case. It may also be triggering some bugs where requests get
dropped entirely and reconnects take too long.

This doesn't rule out HTTP/2 support with Hyper, but it may take a
redesign of the Hyper integration in order to make things work.

Closes #12191
2023-11-20 11:01:48 +01:00

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2.4 KiB
Markdown

# Hyper
Hyper is a separate HTTP library written in Rust. curl can be told to use this
library as a backend to deal with HTTP.
## Experimental!
Hyper support in curl is considered **EXPERIMENTAL** until further notice. It
needs to be explicitly enabled at build-time.
Further development and tweaking of the Hyper backend support in curl will
happen in the master branch using pull-requests, just like ordinary
changes.
## Hyper version
The C API for Hyper is brand new and is still under development.
## build curl with hyper
Using Rust 1.64.0 or later, build hyper and enable its C API like this:
% git clone https://github.com/hyperium/hyper
% cd hyper
% RUSTFLAGS="--cfg hyper_unstable_ffi" cargo rustc --features client,http1,http2,ffi --crate-type cdylib
Also, `--release` can be added for a release (optimized) build.
Build curl to use hyper's C API:
% git clone https://github.com/curl/curl
% cd curl
% autoreconf -fi
% ./configure LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath,<hyper-dir>/target/debug -Wl,-rpath,<hyper-dir>/target/release" --with-openssl --with-hyper=<hyper-dir>
% make
# using Hyper internally
Hyper is a low level HTTP transport library. curl itself provides all HTTP
headers and Hyper provides all received headers back to curl.
Therefore, most of the "header logic" in curl as in responding to and acting
on specific input and output headers are done the same way in curl code.
The API in Hyper delivers received HTTP headers as (cleaned up) name=value
pairs, making it impossible for curl to know the exact byte representation
over the wire with Hyper.
## Limitations
The hyper backend does not support
- `CURLOPT_IGNORE_CONTENT_LENGTH`
- `--raw` and disabling `CURLOPT_HTTP_TRANSFER_DECODING`
- RTSP
- hyper is much stricter about what HTTP header contents it allows
- leading whitespace in first HTTP/1 response header
- HTTP/0.9
- HTTP/2 upgrade using HTTP:// URLs. Aka 'h2c'
- HTTP/2 in general. Hyper has support for HTTP/2 but the curl side
needs changes so that a `hyper_clientconn` can last for the duration
of a connection. Probably this means turning the Hyper HTTP/2 backend
into a connection filter.
## Remaining issues
This backend is still not feature complete with the native backend. Areas that
still need attention and verification include:
- multiplexed HTTP/2
- h2 Upgrade:
- receiving HTTP/1 trailers
- sending HTTP/1 trailers