curl_cffi

Documentation

Python binding for curl-impersonate fork via cffi. For commercial support, visit impersonate.pro.

curl_cffi is the most popular Python binding for curl. Unlike other pure python http clients like httpx or requests, curl_cffi can impersonate browsers' TLS/JA3 and HTTP/2 fingerprints. If you are blocked by some website for no obvious reason, you can give curl_cffi a try.

Python 3.10 is the minimum supported version since v0.14.

Recent highlights

• 💨 http/3 fingerprints and UDP socks5 proxy support was added in v0.15.0!
• 🦞 Added curl-cffi CLI and skills for debugging and for claws/agents.

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Sponsors

Maintenance of this project is made possible by all the contributors and sponsors. If you'd like to sponsor this project and have your avatar or company logo appear below click here. 💖

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Impersonate Suite

curl-cffi is part of the impersonate suite.

• curl-impersonate. A curl distribution that impersonates browsers.
• curl_cffi. Python binding to curl-impersonate.
• impers. Node.js binding to curl-impersonate.
• impersonate.pro. Commercial support, more fingerprints and integrated solutions.

Features

• Supports JA3/TLS and http2 fingerprints impersonation, including recent browsers and custom fingerprints.
• Much faster than requests/httpx, on par with aiohttp/pycurl, see benchmarks.
• Mimics the requests API, no need to learn another one.
• Pre-compiled, so you don't have to compile on your machine.
• Supports asyncio with proxy rotation on each request.
• Supports http 2.0, which requests does not.
• Supports http 3.0, with fingerprints and udp proxy.
• Supports websocket.
• MIT licensed.

	requests	aiohttp	httpx	pycurl	curl_cffi
http/2	❌	❌	✅	✅	✅
http/3	❌	❌	❌	☑️1	✅2
sync	✅	❌	✅	✅	✅
async	❌	✅	✅	❌	✅
websocket	❌	✅	❌	❌	✅
native retry	❌	❌	❌	❌	✅
fingerprints	❌	❌	❌	❌	✅
speed	🐇	🐇🐇	🐇	🐇🐇	🐇🐇

Notes:

1. For pycurl, http/3 is usually disabled at compile time by default.
2. http/3 support since v0.11.4, http/3 proxy and fingerprints since v0.15.0.

curl-cffi CLI(new)

Since v0.15, curl_cffi comes with a CLI called curl-cffi, you can use it for debugging a certain url with the --impersonate option. It can also serve as a web_fetch replacement for "claws" and "agents".

	curl	httpie	curl-cffi
http/2	✅	❌	✅
http/3	☑️1	❌	✅
human-friendly	☑️2	✅	✅
colorful	❌	✅	✅3
fingerprints	❌	❌	✅

Notes:

1. You need an http/3 enabled curl build, it's not enabled by default, at leat on my machine.
2. As a long time command line user, I personally feel very comfortable using curl -X POST httpbin.org, but some users may prefer http GET httpbin.org syntax. If you prefer the curl syntax, you can keep using curl-impersonate.
3. Install curl_cffi[cli] for colorful CLI output. Without rich, the CLI uses plain text output.

Install

pip install curl_cffi --upgrade

This should work on Linux, macOS and Windows out of the box.

On macOS, you can also install via Homebrew:

brew install lexiforest/tap/curl-cffi

Android support, including Termux, is currently in beta, you can install the beta release for testing. For BSD systems, we need to get libcurl-impersonate compile first, and then add support in curl_cffi. If you are using these OSes, please lend an hand.

To install beta releases:

pip install curl_cffi --upgrade --pre

To install unstable version from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/lexiforest/curl_cffi/
cd curl_cffi
make preprocess
pip install .

Usage

curl_cffi comes with a low-level curl API and a high-level requests-like API. curl_cffi also bundles with a CLI called curl-cffi.

CLI

curl-cffi get tls.browserleaks.com/json

# curl-cffi can be hard to type, use an alias if you want
alias imp=curl-cffi
imp get tls.browserleaks.com/json --impersonate chrome

For a complete CLI guide, see docs.

requests-like

import curl_cffi

# Notice the impersonate parameter
r = curl_cffi.get("https://tls.browserleaks.com/json", impersonate="chrome")

print(r.json())
# output: {..., "ja3n_hash": "aa56c057ad164ec4fdcb7a5a283be9fc", ...}
# the js3n fingerprint should be the same as target browser

# To keep using the latest browser version as `curl_cffi` updates,
# simply set impersonate="chrome" without specifying a version.
# Other similar values are: "safari" and "safari_ios"
r = curl_cffi.get("https://tls.browserleaks.com/json", impersonate="chrome")

# Use http/3 with impersonation
r = curl_cffi.get(
    "https://fp.impersonate.pro/api/http3",
    http_version="v3",
    impersonate="chrome"
)

# To pin a specific version, use version numbers together.
r = curl_cffi.get("https://tls.browserleaks.com/json", impersonate="chrome124")

# To impersonate other than browsers, bring your own ja3/akamai strings
# See examples directory for details.
r = curl_cffi.get("https://tls.browserleaks.com/json", ja3=..., akamai=...)

# http/socks proxies are supported
proxies = {"https": "http://localhost:3128"}
r = curl_cffi.get("https://tls.browserleaks.com/json", impersonate="chrome", proxies=proxies)

proxies = {"https": "socks://localhost:3128"}
r = curl_cffi.get("https://tls.browserleaks.com/json", impersonate="chrome", proxies=proxies)

Sessions

s = curl_cffi.Session()

# httpbin is a http test website, this endpoint makes the server set cookies
s.get("https://httpbin.org/cookies/set/foo/bar")
print(s.cookies)
# <Cookies[<Cookie foo=bar for httpbin.org />]>

# retrieve cookies again to verify
r = s.get("https://httpbin.org/cookies")
print(r.json())
# {'cookies': {'foo': 'bar'}}

Supported impersonate browsers

curl_cffi supports the same browser versions preset as supported by our fork of curl-impersonate:

The open source version of curl_cffi includes versions when we are adding new capabilities for impersonating. If you see a version, e.g. chrome135, was skipped, it's simply because there's nothing new or we were busy at that time. You can simply impersonate it with your own headers and the previous browser target.

For a full list of preset fingerprints, see the curl-impersonate docs. We will no longer put duplicated and outdated info here.

If you don't want to look up the headers/etc by yourself, consider buying commercial support from impersonate.pro. We have comprehensive browser tls, http and JavaScript fingerprints database for almost all the browser versions on various platforms.

Since v0.15.1, you can use curl-cffi update to retrieve the latest fingerprints, without updating to a new version. We offer the Safari, Chrome, Firefox updates for free and others as part of the commercial plan.

The current number of fingerprints:

To see the current list of fingerprints on your device, use the command line:

curl-cffi list

To update fingerprints from impersonate.pro, use the command line:

curl-cffi update

If you are trying to impersonate a target other than a browser, use ja3=..., akamai=..., extra_fp=..., and perk=... to specify your own customized fingerprints. See the docs on impersonation for details.

Asyncio

from curl_cffi import AsyncSession

async with AsyncSession() as s:
    r = await s.get("https://example.com")

More concurrency:

import asyncio
from curl_cffi import AsyncSession

urls = [
    "https://google.com/",
    "https://facebook.com/",
    "https://twitter.com/",
]

async with AsyncSession() as s:
    tasks = []
    for url in urls:
        task = s.get(url)
        tasks.append(task)
    results = await asyncio.gather(*tasks)

For low-level APIs, Scrapy integration and other advanced topics, see the docs for more details.

WebSockets

from curl_cffi import WebSocket

def on_message(ws: WebSocket, message: str | bytes):
    print(message)

ws = WebSocket(on_message=on_message)
ws.run_forever("wss://api.gemini.com/v1/marketdata/BTCUSD")

Asyncio WebSockets

import asyncio
from curl_cffi import AsyncSession

async with AsyncSession() as session:
    async with session.ws_connect("wss://echo.websocket.org") as ws:
        await asyncio.gather(