Documentation | 中文 README

Python binding for curl-impersonate via cffi.

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.

Scrapfly is an enterprise-grade solution providing Web Scraping API that aims to simplify the scraping process by managing everything: real browser rendering, rotating proxies, and fingerprints (TLS, HTTP, browser) to bypass all major anti-bots. Scrapfly also unlocks the observability by providing an analytical dashboard and measuring the success rate/block rate in detail.

Scrapfly is a good solution if you are looking for a cloud-managed solution for curl_cffi. If you are managing TLS/HTTP fingerprint by yourself with curl_cffi, they also maintain a curl to python converter.

• Supports JA3/TLS and http2 fingerprints impersonation.
• Much faster than requests/httpx, on par with aiohttp/pycurl, see benchmarks.
• Mimics 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 websocket.

pip install curl_cffi --upgrade

This should work on Linux, macOS and Windows out of the box. If it does not work on you platform, you may need to compile and install curl-impersonate first and set some environment variables like LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

To install beta releases:

pip install curl_cffi --upgrade --pre

To install unstable version from GitHub:

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

curl_cffi comes with a low-level curl API and a high-level requests-like API.

Use the latest impersonate versions, do NOT copy chrome110 here without changing.

from curl_cffi import requests

# Notice the impersonate parameter
r = requests.get("https://tools.scrapfly.io/api/fp/ja3", impersonate="chrome110")

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 = requests.get("https://tools.scrapfly.io/api/fp/ja3", impersonate="chrome")

# http/socks proxies are supported
proxies = {"https": "http://localhost:3128"}
r = requests.get("https://tools.scrapfly.io/api/fp/ja3", impersonate="chrome110", proxies=proxies)

proxies = {"https": "socks://localhost:3128"}
r = requests.get("https://tools.scrapfly.io/api/fp/ja3", impersonate="chrome110", proxies=proxies)

s = requests.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 versions, as supported by my fork of curl-impersonate:

However, only Chrome-like browsers are supported. Firefox support is tracked in #59.

Browser versions will be added only when their fingerprints change. If you see a version, e.g. chrome122, were skipped, you can simply impersonate it with your own headers and the previous version.

• chrome99
• chrome100
• chrome101
• chrome104
• chrome107
• chrome110
• chrome116 ^[1]
• chrome119 ^[1]
• chrome120 ^[1]
• chrome123 ^[3]
• chrome124 ^[3]
• chrome99_android
• edge99
• edge101
• safari15_3 ^[2]
• safari15_5 ^[2]
• safari17_0 ^[1]
• safari17_2_ios ^[1]

Notes:

1. Added in version 0.6.0.
2. Fixed in version 0.6.0, previous http2 fingerprints were not correct.
3. Added in version 0.7.0.

from curl_cffi.requests import AsyncSession

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

More concurrency:

import asyncio
from curl_cffi.requests 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)

from curl_cffi.requests import Session, WebSocket

def on_message(ws: WebSocket, message):
    print(message)

with Session() as s:
    ws = s.ws_connect(
        "wss://api.gemini.com/v1/marketdata/BTCUSD",
        on_message=on_message,
    )
    ws.run_forever()

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

• Originally forked from multippt/python_curl_cffi, which is under the MIT license.
• Headers/Cookies files are copied from httpx, which is under the BSD license.
• Asyncio support is inspired by Tornado's curl http client.
• The WebSocket API is inspired by websocket_client.

Yescaptcha is a proxy service that bypasses Cloudflare and uses the API interface to obtain verified cookies (e.g. cf_clearance). Click here to register: https://yescaptcha.com/i/stfnIO

ScrapeNinja is a web scraping API with two engines: fast, with high performance and TLS fingerprint; and slower with a real browser under the hood.

ScrapeNinja handles headless browsers, proxies, timeouts, retries, and helps with data extraction, so you can just get the data in JSON. Rotating proxies are available out of the box on all subscription plans.

If you find this project useful, please cite it as below:

@software{Kong2023,
  author = {Yifei Kong},
  title = {curl_cffi - A Python HTTP client for impersonating browser TLS and HTTP/2 fingerprints},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  url = {https://github.com/yifeikong/curl_cffi},
}