impit

When scraping websites or building automated clients, many developers hit a wall: servers start blocking your requests or bot detection systems flag you. Running a full browser like Puppeteer or Playwright may work — but it’s heavy, slow, and resource-intensive.

That’s where impit steps in. It’s an open-source HTTP client library from Apify that makes your HTTP requests look and behave like a real browser without running an actual browser process. Built on top of Rust’s powerful networking stack (reqwest, rustls, tokio) and available in JavaScript, Python, and Rust bindings, impit helps you mimic real browser headers, TLS fingerprints, and network protocols (HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3).

With impit you get:

• Browser-like header and TLS impersonation

• Support for proxies and custom timeouts

• Familiar APIs similar to fetch (JavaScript) or HTTP clients

• Multi-language bindings (Rust, Node.js, Python)
  Whether you’re building web scrapers or bots that need to evade detection, impit simplifies browser impersonation at scale.

⚙️ Steps to Install

📦 JavaScript (Node.js)

npm install impit

or

yarn add impit

Then:

import { Impit } from 'impit';

Use exactly like the native fetch API — but with custom impersonation options built-in.

🦀 Rust

Add to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
impit = { git = "https://github.com/apify/impit.git", branch = "master" }

[patch.crates-io]
rustls = { git = "https://github.com/apify/rustls.git" }
h2     = { git = "https://github.com/apify/h2.git" }

You may also need rustflags = "--cfg reqwest_unstable" due to HTTP/3 support.

🐍 Python

pip install impit-python

Then:

from impit import Impit

(Use it like any HTTP client with added impersonation perks.)

🎯 Benefits (Why Use Impit?)

✅ Browser-Like Requests
Imitates real browsers at the network and header level — helps avoid bot detection.

✅ Lightweight & Fast
No full browser required (unlike Puppeteer/Playwright), so it’s faster and uses fewer resources.

✅ Multi-Language Support
Bindings for Rust, Node.js, and Python — ideal for cross-platform scraping stacks.

✅ HTTP/3, Proxy, Custom Headers
Built-in support for modern networking (HTTP/3), proxies, and detailed header control.

👍 Pros & 👎 Cons

👍 Pros

• Easy API similar to fetch (JavaScript)

• Real-browser fingerprinting for better scrape success

• Works with proxies and TLS customizations

• Open-source and transparent

👎 Cons

• Still lower-level than headless browsers — no JS execution

• Rust build can be tricky (needs patched dependencies)

• Not a full crawler — you’ll still need a crawling layer around it

🔄 Alternatives