Question

Is there a gem or library for HTTPS Requests in Ruby? What is it called and can you provide some example usage?

What I am trying to do is open a page, parse some text from it, and then output it.

Answer 1

SSL Request with Ruby Standard Library

require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
Net::HTTP.get URI('https://encrypted.google.com')

Net::HTTP in Ruby (>= 2.0.0) performs SSL verification by default if you pass a URI object that has a "https" URL to it. See https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/778bbac8ac2ae50f0987c4888f7158296ee5bbdd/lib/net/http.rb#L481

You may verify this by performing a get request on a domain with an expired certificate.

uri = URI('https://expired.badssl.com/')
Net::HTTP.get(uri)
# OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError: SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=error: certificate verify failed

SSL Request with Ruby HTTP gems

If you wish to use an alternative, you may use the following gems that also performs SSL verification by default:

1. Excon

Excon is a pure Ruby HTTP implementation.

require 'excon'
Excon.get 'https://encrypted.google.com'

2. Curb

Curb is a HTTP client that uses libcurl under the hood.

require 'curl'
Curl.get 'https://encrypted.google.com'

3. http.rb

HTTP or http.rb is a pure Ruby HTTP implementation but uses http_parser.rb to parse HTTP requests and responses. Since http_parser.rb uses native extensions, it claims to be one of the fastest HTTP client library. But as always, take benchmarks with a grain of salt.

require 'http'
HTTP.get 'https://encrypted.google.com'

4. HTTPClient

HTTPClient is another pure Ruby implementation.

require 'httpclient'
HTTPClient.get 'https://encrypted.google.com'

What’s listed here are HTTP libraries and not HTTP wrappers. Wrapper gems like HTTParty and Faraday either wrap around a particular HTTP implementation or use adapters to provide a unified HTTP interface. You may check out this Comparison matrix of Ruby HTTP client features. It compares the features of every single HTTP client library out there. But do note that the information isn’t updated since 2012.