Goals

1. Straight-forward interface

   Requests is designed to provide a straight forward, unified interface to making requests, regardless of what is available on the system. This means not worrying.

2. Fully tested code

   Requests strives to have 90%+ code coverage from the unit tests, aiming for the ideal 100%. Introducing new features always means introducing new tests

   Note: some parts of the code are not covered by design. These sections are marked with @codeCoverageIgnore tags.

3. Maximum compatibility

   No matter what you have installed on your system, you should be able to run Requests. We use cURL if it’s available, and fallback to sockets otherwise. We require only a baseline of PHP 5.6, leaving the choice of PHP minimum requirement fully in your hands, and giving you the ability to support many more hosts.

4. No dependencies

   Requests is designed to be entirely self-contained and doesn’t require anything else at all. You can run Requests on an entirely stock PHP build without any additional extensions outside the standard library.

---

Next: Why Requests Instead of X?