Do one thing, and do it well.

The HTTP Core package provides a minimal low-level HTTP client, which does one thing only. Sending HTTP requests.

It does not provide any high level model abstractions over the API, does not handle redirects, multipart uploads, building authentication headers, transparent HTTP caching, URL parsing, session cookie handling, content or charset decoding, handling JSON, environment based configuration defaults, or any of that Jazz.

Some things HTTP Core does do:

• Sending HTTP requests.
• Provides both sync and async interfaces.
• Supports HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.
• Async backend support for asyncio, trio and curio.
• Automatic connection pooling.
• HTTP(S) proxy support.

For HTTP/1.1 only support, install with...

$ pip install httpcore

For HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 support, install with...

$ pip install httpcore[http2]

Here's an example of making an HTTP GET request using httpcore...

with httpcore.SyncConnectionPool() as http:
    status_code, headers, stream, extensions = http.handle_request(
        method=b'GET',
        url=(b'https', b'example.org', 443, b'/'),
        headers=[(b'host', b'example.org'), (b'user-agent', b'httpcore')],
        stream=httpcore.ByteStream(b''),
        extensions={}
    )
    body = stream.read()
    print(status_code, body)

Or, using async...

async with httpcore.AsyncConnectionPool() as http:
    status_code, headers, stream, extensions = await http.handle_async_request(
        method=b'GET',
        url=(b'https', b'example.org', 443, b'/'),
        headers=[(b'host', b'example.org'), (b'user-agent', b'httpcore')],
        stream=httpcore.ByteStream(b''),
        extensions={}
    )
    body = await stream.aread()
    print(status_code, body)

You probably don't want to be using HTTP Core directly. It might make sense if you're writing something like a proxy service in Python, and you just want something at the lowest possible level, but more typically you'll want to use a higher level client library, such as httpx.

The motivation for httpcore is:

• To provide a reusable low-level client library, that other packages can then build on top of.
• To provide a really clear interface split between the networking code and client logic, so that each is easier to understand and reason about in isolation.