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biohttp

One HTTP transport layer for R clients of biological web services.

Status: 0.1.0, released. Install from r-universe, read the docs at https://www.samuelbharti.com/biohttp/. The envelope contract is fixed from here; changing it is a breaking change.

Why

An app that talks to a biological web service usually grows its own HTTP layer, and the next app starts by copying it. The copies then drift. One returns a value where another raises a condition. A bug gets fixed in one and not the rest. Every copy has its own opinion about whether a 500 means the source is down.

The awkward part is that none of that is really about biology. It is retry, timeouts, caching, and deciding what a failure means, written again each time because it was easier to copy than to extract.

biohttp is that layer written once and installed rather than copied. It knows how to make an HTTP call and report what happened. It does not know what a gene is, and it never will.

What it does

  • A call returns a value, never a condition. Transport failure, a non-success status code, and a 2xx with an unreadable body are three distinct outcomes the caller branches on.
  • Per-host circuit breaking. Only a transport failure trips the breaker. Once a response is in hand the host is reachable, so a 5xx or a garbage body must never be mistaken for the host being down.
  • Sensible request defaults. Timeout, retry with a transient-failure predicate, an attributable user agent, optional throttling, and headers passed through httr2::req_headers(.redact = ) so a token never prints in a logged request or an error.
  • A success-only cache. A failed call is never stored. Memory tier by default, opt-in disk tier that degrades to memory-only when the directory is not writable.
  • Batched calls. get_json_many() and post_json_many() ask many questions of one source at once, in order, and only the entries the cache is missing reach the network.
  • Query-string credentials. For a service like NCBI E-utilities that has no header form, secret_query attaches the key at dispatch, keeps it out of the cache key, and redacts it from error messages.

What it does not do

  • No Shiny. Not in Imports, not in Suggests, not in tests.
  • No service-specific knowledge. Nothing here knows what a gene is. That belongs in a client package built on top.
  • No parsing beyond JSON and text bodies. No table shaping, no field extraction, no schema.
  • No vendor-specific retry or rate-limit numbers. The package offers the mechanism; the client supplies the policy.
  • No worker pool. Batching covers many questions to one source. Fanning out across a dozen different services at once needs process-level concurrency with a daemon lifecycle, and that belongs in an application.

Dependencies

Imports is httr2, cachem, curl, jsonlite, and rlang, and that is a hard constraint. Every downstream package and app inherits this list, so anything added here is added everywhere. A dependency that looks harmless in a transport layer becomes a transitive dependency of every application that installs it, and of every container image those are built into.

jsonlite is on the list for a reason worth knowing about. httr2 carries it in Suggests, not Imports, and httr2::resp_body_json() calls check_installed("jsonlite") at runtime. Without it declared here, biohttp installs cleanly and then fails on the first get_json() call, which is the package’s main entry point. It costs nothing in practice: shiny imports jsonlite directly, so every consumer app already has it.

curl is declared because redact_secrets() calls curl::curl_escape() directly, matching the encoder httr2 builds query strings with. It is already a hard Imports of httr2, so it adds nothing to what a consumer installs; it is named here because the package uses it rather than merely inheriting it.

Resolved against CRAN on 2026-07-31, with httr2 1.3.0, cachem 1.1.0, jsonlite 2.0.0, and rlang 1.3.0:

Declared Brings in directly
httr2 cli, curl, glue, lifecycle, magrittr, openssl, R6, rlang, vctrs, withr
cachem fastmap, rlang
jsonlite nothing outside base R
rlang nothing outside base R

The full recursive set is 14 non-base packages: askpass, cli, curl, fastmap, glue, jsonlite, lifecycle, magrittr, openssl, R6, rlang, sys, vctrs, withr. askpass and sys arrive under openssl.

No compiled code

The package is pure R. There is no src/, and there will not be. That was evaluated rather than assumed: measured against the live MyGene API, a call spends about 210 ms on the network and 0.2 ms parsing the response, so parsing is roughly one tenth of one percent of the work. A faster native parser, in any language, would be optimizing the wrong end of a call that is waiting on somebody else’s server.

Regenerate this list with:

deps <- tools::package_dependencies(
  c("httr2", "cachem", "jsonlite", "rlang"),
  which = c("Depends", "Imports", "LinkingTo"),
  recursive = TRUE
)
base <- rownames(installed.packages(priority = "base"))
setdiff(sort(unique(unlist(deps))), base)

Installation

From r-universe, which serves prebuilt binaries so there is nothing to compile:

install.packages("biohttp", repos = "https://samuelbharti.r-universe.dev")

Or straight from GitHub, if you want a specific commit or a branch that has not been released yet:

# pak resolves dependencies properly and is the one to reach for
pak::pak("samuelbharti/biohttp")

# a tagged release rather than the tip of main
pak::pak("samuelbharti/biohttp@v0.1.0")

# or, without pak
remotes::install_github("samuelbharti/biohttp")

GitHub installs are built from source, so they need the usual R build tools. Prefer r-universe unless you specifically need an unreleased commit.

Roadmap

Phase State
0. Scaffold done
1. The transport, ported from a working implementation done
2. Apply the envelope contract, write the vignette done
2b. Batched calls and query-string credentials done
3. Publish to r-universe, tag 0.1.0, pkgdown site live done
4. First production migration onto the package not started

Using it

vignette("biohttp") is the guide for client authors. The short version:

res <- get_json(
  "https://mygene.info/v3",
  path = "query",
  query = list(q = "BRCA1", species = "human"),
  source = "MyGene"
)

switch(res$status,
  ok = res$data$hits,
  no_data = NULL,
  skipped = NULL,
  stop(res$error)
)

There is no tryCatch() in that, and there does not need to be. A DNS failure, a 503, and a 200 carrying an HTML maintenance page all come back as values.

Citing biohttp

Each release is archived on Zenodo. Use the concept DOI, which always resolves to the newest release:

Bharti, S. (2026). biohttp: Normalized HTTP Transport with Circuit Breaking and Caching. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21731864

To pin the exact version you used, cite its own DOI instead. Version 0.1.0 is 10.5281/zenodo.21731865.

CITATION.cff carries the same metadata, so citation("biohttp") in R and the “Cite this repository” button on GitHub both work.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. The scope lines above are the first thing a pull request is checked against.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.md.