Alloy Book

HTTP Provider

The Http provider establishes an HTTP connection with a node, allowing you to send JSON-RPC requests to the node to fetch data, simulate calls, send transactions and much more.

Initializing an Http Provider

The recommended way of initializing a Http provider is by using the on_http method on the ProviderBuilder.

//! Example of creating an HTTP provider using the `on_http` method on the `ProviderBuilder`.

use alloy::providers::{Provider, ProviderBuilder};
use eyre::Result;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> eyre::Result<()> {
    // Set up the HTTP transport which is consumed by the RPC client.
    let rpc_url = "https://eth.merkle.io".parse()?;

    // Create a provider with the HTTP transport using the `reqwest` crate.
    let provider = ProviderBuilder::new().on_http(rpc_url);

    Ok(())
}

An alternative way of initializing is to use the on_builtin method on the ProviderBuilder. This method will automatically determine the connection type (Http, Ws or Ipc) depending on the format of the URL. This method is particularly useful if you need a boxed transport.

//! Example of creating an HTTP provider using the `on_builtin` method on the `ProviderBuilder`.

use alloy::providers::{Provider, ProviderBuilder};
use eyre::Result;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> eyre::Result<()> {
    // Create a provider with the HTTP transport using the `reqwest` crate.
    let provider = ProviderBuilder::new().on_builtin("https://eth.merkle.io").await?;

    Ok(())
}

Example: http

Example

To run this example:

• Clone the examples repository: git clone git@github.com:alloy-rs/examples.git
• Run: cargo run --example http

//! Example of using the HTTP provider with the `reqwest` crate to get the latest block number.

use alloy::providers::{Provider, ProviderBuilder};
use eyre::Result;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<()> {
    // Create a provider with the HTTP transport using the `reqwest` crate.
    let rpc_url = "https://eth.merkle.io".parse()?;
    let provider = ProviderBuilder::new().on_http(rpc_url);

    // Get latest block number.
    let latest_block = provider.get_block_number().await?;

    println!("Latest block number: {latest_block}");

    Ok(())
}

Find the source code on Github here.