httr

httr is an R package that provides a user-friendly wrapper around the curl package for working with HTTP and web APIs. It’s now superseded by httr2, which is recommended for new projects.

The package simplifies HTTP requests with dedicated functions for common verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) and handles connection management, cookies, and SSL certificates automatically. It provides flexible response parsing (raw, text, JSON, XML, HTML, images), authentication support including OAuth 1.0 and 2.0, and configuration helpers for timeouts, headers, proxies, and progress tracking. The standardized response object makes it straightforward to extract status, headers, and body content from API calls.