urlx
curl, rewritten in Rust.

urlx is a memory-safe, from-scratch reimplementation of curl and libcurl. No OpenSSL. No unsafe outside the FFI boundary. 1,300 of curl's own tests pass against urlx.

# It's curl. Just in Rust.
urlx https://example.com
urlx -d '{"key":"val"}' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' https://api.example.com
urlx -Lo file.tar.gz https://example.com/file.tar.gz
urlx -u user:pass --digest https://api.example.com/admin
urlx -Z https://a.com https://b.com https://c.com   # parallel transfers

curl is one of the most important pieces of software ever written. It's also 180,000 lines of C with a long history of memory safety CVEs. urlx asks: what if we just rewrote it?

• Memory-safe — zero unsafe in the core library and CLI
• No OpenSSL — TLS via rustls, with optional OpenSSL for TLS-SRP
• Drop-in CLI — same flags, same output, same exit codes — 261 long flags, 46 short
• Drop-in C library — liburlx-ffi exposes the libcurl C ABI for existing C/C++ programs
• Idiomatic Rust API — async/sync Easy/Multi handles, thiserror errors, feature-flagged protocols
• Tested against curl itself — curl's own test suite is the spec

urlx is validated against curl's own test suite (tests 1–1400):

cargo install urlx-cli          # from crates.io
brew install jonwiggins/tap/urlx  # Homebrew

Or build from source:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/jonwiggins/urlx
cd urlx && cargo build --release

let mut easy = liburlx::Easy::new();
easy.url("https://httpbin.org/get")?;
let response = easy.perform()?;
println!("{}", response.status());    // 200
println!("{}", response.body_str()?); // {"origin": "..."}

[dependencies]
liburlx = "0.2"

#include "urlx.h"

CURL *curl = curl_easy_init();
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com");
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1L);
CURLcode res = curl_easy_perform(curl);
curl_easy_cleanup(curl);

Link against liburlx_ffi instead of libcurl — no code changes needed.

                    ┌─────────────┐
                    │   urlx CLI  │  Drop-in curl replacement
                    └──────┬──────┘
                           │
┌──────────────┐    ┌──────┴──────┐
│ liburlx-ffi  │────│   liburlx   │  Core Rust library
│  (C ABI)     │    │  (Rust API) │
└──────────────┘    └──────┬──────┘
                           │
              ┌────────────┼────────────┐
              │            │            │
        ┌─────┴─────┐ ┌───┴───┐ ┌─────┴─────┐
        │ Protocols  │ │  TLS  │ │    DNS    │
        │ HTTP, FTP, │ │rustls │ │  Cache,   │
        │ WS, SMTP...│ │       │ │  HE, DoH  │
        └────────────┘ └───────┘ └───────────┘

Three crates, one workspace:

See CONTRIBUTING.md. The short version:

cargo fmt && cargo clippy --all-targets && cargo test --workspace

Every commit must pass the full guardrail suite. Conventional commits are enforced by CI.

urlx would not exist without curl by Daniel Stenberg. curl's behavior is our specification, and its test suite is our acceptance criteria.

Built with tokio, rustls, h2, quinn, and russh.

MIT