🔥 Why?

In most existing libraries (2025):

• Managing reliable retries is difficult, tricky with streams and not battle-tested
• Using multiple forward proxies has several benefits like higher availability and increased bandwidth but Intercepting retries to use another Egress controller between two requests is not possible.
• Many request libraries are heavy: node-fetch, superagent, needle, got, axios, request
• Lightweight alternatives are not as light as they claim due to dependencies (simple-get, tiny-req, puny-req, phin, ...)

⚡️ Rock-req solves these problems with only 150 lines of code and zero dependencies

It also supports many features:

• Follows redirects
• Handles gzip/deflate/brotli responses
• Modify defaults
• Extend and create new instances
• Automatically destroy input/output stream on error and premature close event
• Advanced retries
• URL Rewrite
• Ultra-fast (> 20k req/s)
• Keep Alive by default (3000ms)
• Composable
• Timeouts
• Promises interface
• HTTPS / HTTP
• Composes well with npm packages for features like cookies, proxies, form data, & OAuth
• Keep 98% of the simple-get API (fork source)

When the callback is called, the request is 100% finished, even with streams.

🚀 Benchmark Rock-req vs got, axios, node-fetch, phin, simple-get, superagent, ...

Stop using "slow-by-default" and "false-light" HTTP request libraries!

2025-11-14 on MacBook Pro M4 Max with all dependencies updated on this date

| Library | NodeJS 22 | NodeJS 24 | NodeJS 25 | Bun v1.3.2 | LOC (2025/2023) | |--------------|-----------:|------------:|---------:|-----------:|----------------:| | rock-req 🙋‍♂️ | 26842 ops | 26782 ops | 26179 ops | 21229 ops | 152 (+5%) | | simple-get | 26532 ops | 26802 ops | 25954 ops | 21187 ops | 317 (+0%) | | axios | 4110 ops | 3999 ops | 3996 ops | 14788 ops | 19883 (+42%) | | got | 14786 ops | 15234 ops | 15149 ops | 15287 ops | 16904 (+83%) | | fetch | 15676 ops | 16252 ops | 15784 ops | 27675 ops | 54211 (+306%) | | request | 17102 ops | 14586 ops | 14346 ops | 18202 ops | 58057 (+24%) | | superagent | 3862 ops | 3979 ops | 3889 ops | 19271 ops | 31913 (+98%) | | phin | 15549 ops | 14160 ops | 13915 ops | 15430 ops | 20064 (+5960%) | | undici* | 32480 ops | 33272 ops | 32738 ops | 25961 ops | 23235 (+43%) |

2023-04-19 on Macbook Pro M1 Max with all dependencies updated on this date

| Library | NodeJS 16 | NodeJS 18 | NodeJS 20* | Size deps inc. | | ------------ |--------------:|--------------:| --------------:| --------------:| | rock-req 🙋‍♂️ | 22816 ops | 21797 ops | 21964 ops | 144 LOC | | simple-get | 2937 ops | 3260 ops | 21258 ops | 317 LOC | | axios | 5090 ops | 4910 ops | 3196 ops | 13983 LOC | | got | 2163 ops | 1762 ops | 9961 ops | 9227 LOC | | fetch | 2101 ops | 2102 ops | 2020 ops | 13334 LOC | | request | 2249 ops | 1869 ops | 15815 ops | 46572 LOC | | superagent | 2776 ops | 2100 ops | 2895 ops | 16109 LOC | | phin | 3178 ops | 1164 ops | 21299 ops | 331 LOC | | undici* | 24095 ops | 24378 ops | 24191 ops | 16225 LOC |

LOC = Lines of Code, including dependencies (excluding dev dependencies) ops = request per second

Since Node.js 20, HTTP keep-alive is activated by default, just like in rock-req. This improves the overall performance of all frameworks.

undici is a low-level API and a faster alternative to the native Node.js HTTP module. It represents the performance ceiling for Node.js.

rock-req uses only the native Node.js HTTP module and provides many high-level features — far more than phin and simple-get — with fewer lines of code.

Interestingly, the differences are less visible on Bun.sh.

Install

  npm install rock-req

Documentation

The full documentation is here to reduce Node package file size.

Supporters

This packaged in maintained by Carbone:

Thank you Feross Aboukhadijeh, creator of simple-get