PR Type

Bug Fix

PR Checklist

• Tests for the changes have been added / updated.
• Documentation comments have been added / updated.
• A changelog entry has been made for the appropriate packages.
• Format code with the latest stable rustfmt.
• (Team) Label with affected crates and semver status.

Overview

The existing implementation for awc incorrectly sends a request-body for http methods that don't support one, such as GET/HEAD/OPTIONS/TRACE. This is especially apparent when passing a stream into the request for all methods since it uses chunked content-encoding.

I discovered this whilst implementing a reverse-proxy using actix-web and awc.

Example:

GET / HTTP/1.1
transfer-encoding: chunked
accept-encoding: br, gzip, deflate, zstd
host: localhost:8000
date: Thu, 31 Jul 2025 03:51:41 GMT

0

You can verify this yourself with a simple script (I'm using netcat to view the request nc -lvp 8000):

use std::{
    pin::Pin,
    task::{Context, Poll},
};

use awc::{error::PayloadError, http::Method};
use bytes::Bytes;
use futures_core::Stream;

struct ReqStream;

impl Stream for ReqStream {
    type Item = Result<Bytes, PayloadError>;
    fn poll_next(self: Pin<&mut Self>, _cx: &mut Context<'_>) -> Poll<Option<Self::Item>> {
        Poll::Ready(None)
    }
}

#[actix_rt::main]
async fn main() {
    let client = awc::Client::default();
    let res = client
        .request(Method::GET, "http://localhost:8000")
        .send_stream(ReqStream {})
        .await;
    println!("response: {res:?}");
}

The following changes ensure that the body and its associated headers are not included for the standard request methods, resulting in a correct request:

GET / HTTP/1.1
accept-encoding: br, gzip, deflate, zstd
host: localhost:8000
date: Thu, 31 Jul 2025 04:00:59 GMT