curl_cffi - Python binding for curl-impersonate

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.

• 💨 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.

If you’re looking for a meeting recording API, consider checking out Recall.ai, an API that records Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, in-person meetings, and more.

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. 💖

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

TLS fingerprinting alone isn't enough for modern bot protection. Hyper Solutions provides the missing piece - API endpoints that generate valid antibot tokens for:

Akamai • DataDome • Kasada • Incapsula

No browser automation. Just simple API calls that return the exact cookies and headers these systems require.

🚀 Get Your API Key | 📖 Docs | 💬 Discord

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.

• 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:

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

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:

• You need an http/3 enabled curl build, it's not enabled by default, at leat on my machine.
• As a long time command line user, I personally feel very comfortable using curl -X POST httpbin.org

, but some users may preferhttp GET httpbin.org

syntax. If you prefer the curl syntax, you can keep usingcurl-impersonate

. - Install curl_cffi[cli]

for colorful CLI output. Withoutrich

, the CLI uses plain text output.

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 .

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

.

curl-cffi get tls.browserleaks.com/json

alias imp=curl-cffi
imp get tls.browserleaks.com/json --impersonate chrome

For a complete CLI guide, see docs.

import curl_cffi

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

print(r.json())

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

r = curl_cffi.get(
    "https://fp.impersonate.pro/api/http3",
    http_version="v3",
    impersonate="chrome"
)

r = curl_cffi.get("https://tls.browserleaks.com/json", impersonate="chrome124")

r = curl_cffi.get("https://tls.browserleaks.com/json", ja3=..., akamai=...)

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)
s = curl_cffi.Session()

s.get("https://httpbin.org/cookies/set/foo/bar")
print(s.cookies)

r = s.get("https://httpbin.org/cookies")
print(r.json())

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.

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.

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")
python
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(*[ws.send_str("Hello, World!") for _ in range(10)])
        async for message in ws:
            print(message)

See the WebSocket docs for full details and advanced options.

• Integrating with Scrapy: divtiply/scrapy-curl-cffi,jxlil/scrapy-impersonateandtieyongjie/scrapy-fingerprint. - Integrating with requests,httpxas adapter. - Integrating with captcha resolvers: YesCaptcha.

• 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 synchronous WebSocket API is inspired by websocket_client. - The asynchronous WebSocket API is inspired by aiohttp.

When submitting an PR, please use a different branch other than main

and check the "Allow edits by maintainers" box, so I can update your PR with lint or style fixes. Thanks!

• Using AI is neither encouraged nor discouraged, use it by your own choice.
• The bottom line here is that every line of code should be reviewed by human, and should beproven to work. - It's not guaranteed that AI will come up with the cleanest solution, you are responsible to guide it to the right way you know.
• Fix any lint errors, make sure your code follows the established convention in this project.
• LLM tends to generate extensive or none comments, revise the comments and make sure they are concise and helpful.
• It's absolutely not acceptable to generate the entire PR summary by LLM. To communicate with other human, use words from a human. - The only acceptable exception is to fix grammar issues if you are not a native English speaker.
• The essence here is to keep Human in the loop

You can even feed the policy above to your "copilot" to let it adjust the style for you. :P

source & further reading

github.com — original article