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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

biohttp 0.1.3

The batched path never retried anything, silently. max_tries was accepted by every batched entry point and did nothing once req_perform_parallel() was in play, because httr2 does not run its own retry policy there and nothing in this package replaced it. A rate-limited host got the same burst rate that just triggered the limit, Retry-After was read by no code path in the batched direction, and a run against a slow-to-recover source spent its whole retry budget on requests that never had a chance.

Added

  • A retry pass in the batched path (perform_many() and its cached counterparts): after the first dispatch, only the requests that came back rate_limited, timeout, or a 5xx are sent again, up to max_tries. A settled answer is never retried.
  • ratelimit_record(), ratelimit_wait(), and ratelimit_reset(): a per-host pause, separate from the circuit breaker, set from a 429 or 503’s Retry-After (or a default when there is none) and honored before the next dispatch to that host. BIOHTTP_RATELIMIT_DEFAULT_PAUSE sets the fallback.
  • transport_stats() and transport_stats_reset(): per-host counts of what the batched path actually dispatched, retried, and saw rate limited, for a caller to check after a run rather than guess from wall-clock time.
  • envelope() (and status_rate_limited()) gain a retry_after field, read from the response’s Retry-After header, NA_real_ when there was none.

Changed

  • max_tries on get_json_many() and post_json_many() now does what its documentation always said it did. A caller relying on the old silent behavior (every entry dispatched exactly once, regardless of the setting) should pass max_tries = 1 explicitly.
  • The breaker’s rule is unchanged: a 429 still proves the host is reachable and still clears its failure count. Pacing a rate-limited host is the new ledger’s job, not a reason to take the host out of rotation.

biohttp 0.1.2

CRAN release: 2026-09-03

Preparation for a first CRAN submission. Everything here came out of reading the package the way a CRAN reviewer reads one, which is a different pass from the one that gets a suite green.

Changed

  • The disk cache defaults to tools::R_user_dir("biohttp", "cache") rather than data/cache. The old default was a relative path, so it resolved against whatever directory R was started in: a job run from two working directories quietly kept two caches, and neither knew about the other. CRAN policy also asks that a package write outside tempdir() only where a user expects it to, and a directory appearing under the working directory is not that place. Only a caller who had opted into the disk tier with BIOHTTP_CACHE_DISK is affected, and setting BIOHTTP_CACHE_DIR still overrides it. An existing data/cache is not migrated; it is a cache, so the cost of abandoning it is one cold start.
  • tools joins Imports for that call. It ships with R, so it adds nothing to what a consumer installs, and it is declared because R CMD check requires a declaration for anything reached with ::.
  • DESCRIPTION gains a reference for the circuit breaker, names the language as en-US, and hyphenates “service-specific”.

Fixed

  • Every environment variable the package reads now treats an empty export the same way it treats an absent one. Sys.getenv()’s default argument only fires when a name is absent, so a container passing through a variable its operator never filled in got "" rather than the default, and four readers were doing that. env_num() and env_flag() had always had the rule; env_chr() gives it to the rest.

    The one that mattered was BIOHTTP_CALLER_IDENTITY. Exported empty, it sent User-Agent: biohttp/0.1.2 out as /0.1.2: a version with nothing in front of it, which is the one thing a user agent exists to carry, on a package whose point is being attributable to the service you are calling. Every test in the suite ran that way, because setup.R clears those variables by exporting them empty, and no test looked.

    BIOHTTP_CACHE_DIR was the same defect with a smaller blast radius: "" as a directory is the working directory, which is what the change above removes. BIOHTTP_CONTACT_URL, BIOHTTP_CONTACT_EMAIL and BIOHTTP_CACHE_SALT all default to "" anyway, so they read the same as before.

  • The status_message() example no longer calls withr, which is in Suggests. An example may only use what Imports guarantees: CRAN checks with _R_CHECK_DEPENDS_ONLY_ set, where a Suggests package is simply absent and the example errors. It now sets the option with options() and restores it, which also satisfies the separate rule that an example puts back anything it changes.

Added

  • inst/CITATION is shipped, so citation("biohttp") carries the Zenodo DOI from an installed copy. CITATION.cff is in .Rbuildignore and never reached a tarball, so the README had been promising something only a source checkout could deliver. Both exist now, because GitHub’s cite box reads the .cff and R reads inst/CITATION.

Documentation

  • The README linked to CONTRIBUTING.md and LICENSE.md by relative path. Both are in .Rbuildignore, so neither reaches a tarball and both links were dead for anyone reading the README somewhere other than GitHub, which from here includes the CRAN package page. They are absolute now.
  • The README’s Imports list named five packages where DESCRIPTION names six. A README that contradicts the DESCRIPTION printed beside it on the CRAN page is worth more than the line it saves.
  • The status line no longer carries a version number. The last one went stale within a release of being written, and NEWS.md already answers the question.

biohttp 0.1.1

Everything here came out of the first real migration onto 0.1.0, which is where a transport contract meets an app that already had its own opinions.

Fixed

  • cache_reset() no longer orphans a reference taken from cache(). It used to drop the store, so the next cache() built a new one and anything held earlier pointed at a dead object: writes went where nothing else could see them, reads returned stale entries, and the only symptom was a hit rate quietly falling to zero. The reset now clears the store in place when no cache setting has changed, and only rebuilds when one has, which is what test isolation needs (#21).

Added

  • BIOHTTP_CACHE_MAX_N bounds the memory tier by number of entries. BIOHTTP_CACHE_MAX_SIZE bounds bytes, and a long-running process answering many small responses stays well under that while holding far more entries than intended. Defaults to cachem’s own Inf, so nothing changes unless it is set (#22).
  • status_message() produces every user-facing sentence in the package, and setting the biohttp.status_message option replaces them. That is how an app keeps its own voice, or localizes, while adopting the transport. Returning anything other than a single non-empty string falls back to the built-in, so overriding one status and leaving the rest is the expected use. The override runs inside tryCatch(), because it sits on the failure path and the package promises never to raise there (#23).

Changed

  • The status_*() constructors used to hardcode their own copies of sentences that also lived in http_error_message(), and the two had drifted: three different sentences existed for “temporarily unavailable”. They now share one set. status_error()’s default gains “Please try again.” as a result, which is the only user-visible wording change.
  • A 408 now reads “took too long to respond” rather than the generic “could not retrieve”. classify_http() has always called 408 a timeout, so the envelope said timeout while the sentence a user read said something else. They agree now.
  • The vignette’s cache table documents BIOHTTP_CACHE_MAX_SIZE and BIOHTTP_CACHE_DISK_TTL, which it had never listed.
  • A test asserts DESCRIPTION, .zenodo.json and CITATION.cff agree on the version. Nothing read it from one source, so a stale archive label was a matter of time.

biohttp 0.1.0

First version with a public contract. The envelope shape is fixed from here; changing it after this is a breaking change.

The contract

  • Every call returns an envelope() and never raises on an HTTP or a parse failure. Callers branch on res$status and write no tryCatch() of their own.
  • Seven statuses, ordered best to worst: ok, no_data, stale, rate_limited, timeout, skipped, error. ok is derived from status so the two cannot disagree.
  • error carries one sentence fit for a user; detail carries the technical cause for a log. They are never mixed.
  • vignette("biohttp") documents the whole thing.

Transport

  • get_json(), post_json(), and get_text() assemble, perform, and cache a call. perform() and perform_text() take a request you built yourself.
  • req_defaults() applies the timeout, bounded retry on transient codes, an attributable user agent, optional throttling, and redacted headers. A token never prints in an inspected request, a log line, or an error message.
  • Per-host circuit breaking, where only a transport failure counts against a host. A 5xx, or a 2xx with an unreadable body, proves the host is reachable and clears the count.
  • A success-only cache. A failure is never stored, so a transient outage resolves itself instead of getting stuck. The disk tier is opt-in and degrades to memory-only when its directory is not usable.

Batched calls

  • perform_many() performs a list of prepared requests and returns a list of envelopes the same length and in the same order, so a caller zips results back onto its inputs by position.
  • get_json_many() and post_json_many() serve whatever the cache already holds, perform only the entries it is missing, and store the successes. A warm gene list becomes zero requests, and a half-warm one becomes only as many as are genuinely unknown.
  • Keys are built exactly the way the single-call wrappers build theirs, so a batch reuses entries a single call warmed and the other way around.
  • Identical queries within one batch are collapsed to a single request, and the result is handed back to every position that asked for it.
  • A failed entry in a batch is still never cached.
  • These are for many questions to one source. httr2 applies req_throttle() and req_retry() across a whole list rather than per request, so requests are grouped by host and the groups run one after another. Fanning out across a dozen different services needs process-level concurrency, which belongs in an application rather than in a transport package.
  • A host with an open breaker is never dispatched to, and every one of its requests in the batch comes back skipped. Inside a batch the breaker cannot short-circuit requests already in flight, so transport failures recorded there take effect on the next call.

Query-string credentials

  • The wrappers take secret_query, a named list of query parameters carrying a credential. NCBI E-utilities is why it exists: its api_key raises a caller from 3 to 10 requests a second and there is no header form, so the credential has to travel in the URL.
  • The credential is attached at dispatch rather than by the caller, so the request object never holds it and nothing built from req$url beforehand, the cache key included, can carry it.
  • It is deliberately not part of the cache key. A rate-limit credential does not change the answer, so letting it partition the cache would discard every warmed entry the moment a key was configured or rotated. A credential that changes what comes back must go in headers, which is part of the key. SECURITY.md states the rule.
  • redact_secrets() is applied to the messages built from a transport or a parse failure, because a curl error normally carries the URL that failed. It matches both the raw value and the percent-encoded form a URL carries, so a key holding +, /, or = is caught.
  • httr2::req_url_query() has no .redact, and passing one does not error: it is taken as another query parameter and appended to the URL. This package therefore does the redaction itself rather than delegating it.

Migration

  • as_legacy_envelope() translates to the older four-field shape so an existing app can migrate in a reviewable diff. Deprecated on arrival, scheduled for removal in 0.3.0.