Allow customization of internal HTTP client

[jtaox]

Hello! I'm using your library and I noticed that there's no option to customize the internal HTTP client used for API requests when calling Client::new(). This makes it impossible to implement a proxy for all HTTP requests.

I was wondering if it would be possible to add a customization option for the internal reqwest client, similar to what the chatgpt-api offer. This would allow for greater flexibility and more use cases for this library.

[64bit]

Hi @jtaox , happy to know you found it useful.

Can you elaborate more about the use case with custom reqwest/HTTP client? What customization would you like to do?

I havent had to use a proxy yet, so your use case can help me understand better.

[TmLev]

@64bit sometimes you may have a misbehaving virtual machine that doesn't like certain IP addresses. In such case you can specify an HTTP proxy for reqwest to proxy all the requests.

[jtaox]

@64bit In China, some websites are banned by the GFW, making it impossible to access them directly. Therefore, it's necessary to use a foreign server as a proxy to access these websites

[jtaox]

@64bit @TmLev Thank you for your patient response. After carefully reviewing the request documentation at proxies, I found that reqwest enables proxies by default, as long as the system environment variables are set correctly. Therefore, #48 does not need to be merged.

[64bit]

Aha glad you found a solution :)

Thank you for contributing and sharing about GFW.

I'll close this as it's resolved for you.

[TmLev]

While proxies may be set up by the means of environment variables, supporting custom middleware is still a thing :)

For instance, there is a tracing middleware which enables the use of OpenTelemetry traces: https://crates.io/crates/reqwest-tracing

[64bit]

Hi @TmLev , Your use case is different from the original need for it, but this issue is broad enough so I'll re-open this.

For having middlewares on client side, I see more info on seanmonstar/reqwest#155 and https://truelayer.com/blog/adding-middleware-support-to-rust-reqwest/

So until reqwest natively support it, PRs are welcome, if this changes the type signature then additional work required in #48?

[TmLev]

I doubt reqwest will support it natively in the near future, which makes reqwest-middleware the only alternative (the other one is using tower::Service which is quite cumbersome).

Unfortunately, reqwest-eventsource only works with reqwest::RequestBuilder, so I'll need some time to glue them together.

In the meantime, I did a small optimization (which was a low-hanging fruit, really): #58

[64bit]

Nice optimization!

tower::Service indeed cumbersome but most powerful if it can be leveraged client side.

reqwest-middleware would be a good step. Please take your time, no rush.

[64bit]

Happy 1 year anniversary for this issue 😄

I think its safe to close it, seems like having feature to provide reqwest client in with_http_client is good enough.
Hence, closing this.