tomas/needle

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1634 stars · 237 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Needle is a lean, streamable HTTP client library for Node.js with only two real dependencies. It supports callbacks, promises, and streams, along with proxy forwarding, multipart uploads, compression decoding, and automatic JSON/XML parsing.

Use cases

• make simple HTTP requests in Node.js
• upload files via multipart form-data
• download data as a stream to a file
• call REST APIs and parse JSON responses automatically
• send requests through an HTTP proxy with authentication
• handle non-UTF-8 response charsets
• follow redirects with fine-grained control

When to choose

• you want a lightweight HTTP client with minimal dependencies
• you need streaming uploads or downloads in Node.js
• you need proxy, multipart, or charset decoding support out of the box
• you prefer a simple API over heavier clients like axios or got

When to avoid

• you need a browser or non-Node.js runtime client
• you want a modern fetch-based API with interceptors
• you need advanced features like retry policies or request cancellation beyond AbortSignal
• you are building a large app where a more feature-rich client ecosystem is preferable

Facets

library · maturity active

http-client web-development apis developer-tools http-requests multipart-upload proxy-support streaming charset-decoding redirect-following gzip-deflate-brotli nodejs

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