How do I make an HTTP request from Rust?

The easiest way to make HTTP requests in Rust is with the reqwest crate:

use std::error::Error;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> {
    let resp = reqwest::blocking::get("https://httpbin.org/ip")?.text()?;
    println!("{:#?}", resp);
    Ok(())
}

In Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
reqwest = { version = "0.11", features = ["blocking"] }

Async

Reqwest also supports making asynchronous HTTP requests using Tokio:

use std::error::Error;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> {
    let resp = reqwest::get("https://httpbin.org/ip")
        .await?
        .text()
        .await?;
    println!("{:#?}", resp);
    Ok(())
}

In Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
reqwest = "0.11"
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }

Hyper

Reqwest is an easy to use wrapper around Hyper, which is a popular HTTP library for Rust. You can use it directly if you need more control over managing connections. A Hyper-based example is below and is largely inspired by an example in its documentation:

use hyper::{body::HttpBody as _, Client, Uri};
use std::error::Error;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> {
    let client = Client::new();

    let res = client
        .get(Uri::from_static("http://httpbin.org/ip"))
        .await?;

    println!("status: {}", res.status());

    let buf = hyper::body::to_bytes(res).await?;

    println!("body: {:?}", buf);
}

In Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
hyper = { version = "0.14", features = ["full"] }
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }

Original answer (Rust 0.6)

I believe what you’re looking for is in the standard library. now in rust-http and Chris Morgan’s answer is the standard way in current Rust for the foreseeable future. I’m not sure how far I can take you (and hope I’m not taking you the wrong direction!), but you’ll want something like:

// Rust 0.6 -- old code
extern mod std;

use std::net_ip;
use std::uv;

fn main() {
    let iotask = uv::global_loop::get();
    let result = net_ip::get_addr("www.duckduckgo.com", &iotask);

    io::println(fmt!("%?", result));
}

As for encoding, there are some examples in the unit tests in src/libstd/net_url.rs.