ASIO cURL

ASIO cURL is a C++14 library which provides asynchronous access to the facilities of libcurl using ASIO or Boost.ASIO.

Why ASIO cURL?

Because I couldn't find anything else other than this (which is hardly adequate).

What is ASIO cURL?

ASIO cURL is not intended to be a C++ wrapper for libcurl, rather it is intended to provide features which allow you to gain all the advantages of ASIO and the libcurl multi interface while never having to make a single curl_multi_* call.

Code that uses ASIO cURL will still use the C-style curl_easy_* calls. This is to avoid limiting client code by failing to abstract a certain niche feature or option of libcurl (or by failing to stay up-to-date as libcurl adds new features, options, et cetera).

That said three helper classes for the libcurl easy interface are provided:

• asiocurl::easy which wraps a CURL * in a C++ class (with, of course, RAII)
• asiocurl::easy_with_error_buffer which provides all the convenience of asiocurl::easy plus automatic use of CURLOPT_ERRORBUFFER
• asiocurl::easy_error an exception type which represents a CURLcode

However their use is completely optional to use ASIO cURL. All client-facing edges of the core ASIO cURL class (asiocurl::io_service) deal with raw CURL * objects.

Boost

While ASIO cURL can use Boost (>=1.54 supported) this is not necessary. When invoking CMake the following flags control use of Boost:

• USE_BOOST_FUTURE: If 1 then asiocurl::future will be boost::future, if 0 asiocurl::future will be std::future (asiocurl::promise is also provided)
• USE_BOOST_ASIO: If 1 then the contents of the asiocurl::asio namespace will be the contents of the boost::asio namespace, if 0 the contents of the asiocurl::asio namespace will be the contents of the asio namespace

Both of these flags default to 1 (i.e. use Boost).

To completely remove the dependency on Boost set USE_BOOST_FUTURE=0 and USE_BOOST_ASIO=0.

Note that USE_BOOST_ASIO=0 adds a dependency on non-Boost ASIO.

Using ASIO cURL

To use ASIO cURL you must:

1. Create an asiocurl::asio::io_service
2. Create an asiocurl::io_service
3. Create and setup a libcurl easy handle
4. Call asiocurl::io_service::add and pass the easy handle from 3
5. Ensure asiocurl::asio::io_service::run, asiocurl::asio::io_service::run_one, asiocurl::asio::io_service::poll, and/or asiocurl::asio::io_service::poll_one are being called
6. Wait on the future from 4 to get a CURLMsg structure which represents the final result of your transfer

Example

//	Setup ASIO or Boost.ASIO
asiocurl::asio::io_service ios;
std::experimental::optional<boost::asio::io_service::work> work(std::experimental::in_place,ios);
std::thread t([&] () { ios.run(); });

//	Setup libcurl (i.e. call curl_global_init)
asiocurl::init init;

//	Setup ASIO cURL
asiocurl::io_service curl;

//	Setup easy handle for HTTP transfer
asiocurl::easy_with_error_buffer easy;
const char * url="http://google.com";
auto result=curl_easy_setopt(easy,CURLOPT_URL,url);
if (result!=CURLE_OK) easy.raise(result);

//	Run
auto msg=curl.add(easy).get();

Dependencies

• Boost (see above)
• ASIO (see above)
• libcurl

Supported Compilers

The following compilers have been tested:

Linux

• Clang 3.8
• GCC 5.3.0
• GCC 6.1.1

Windows

• GCC 5.3.0

Build

Linux

cmake .
make

Windows

cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" .
make

If you would like to build and run the tests call CMake with -DBUILD_TESTS=1. The tests add Catch as a dependency. The tests will be built and run automatically if you build in debug mode.

Documentation

To build full documentation simply run doxygen.