RestSharp

Get Help

Got issues, questions, suggestions? Please read this page carefully to understand how you can get help working with RestSharp.

Questions

The most effective way to resolve questions about using RestSharp is StackOverflow.

RestSharp has a large user base. Tens of thousands of projects and hundreds of thousands of developers use RestSharp on a daily basis. So, asking questions on StackOverflow with restsharpopen in new window tag would most definitely lead you to a solution.

WARNING

Please do not use GitHub issues to ask question about using RestSharp.

Discussions

We have a mail listopen in new window at Google Groups dedicated to discussions about using RestSharp, feature proposals and similar topics. It is perfectly fine to ask questions about using RestSharp at that group too.

Please check the group and engage with the community if you feel a need to discuss things that you struggle with or want to improve.

Bugs and issues

The last resort to get help when you experience some unexpected behaviour, a crash or anything else that you consider a bug, is submitting an issue at our GitHub repository.

WARNING

Do not ignore our contribution guidelines, otherwise you risk your issue to be closed without being considered. Respect the maintainers, be specific and provide as many details about the issue as you can.

Ensure you provide the following in the issue:

  • Expected behaviour
  • Actual behaviour
  • Why do you think it is an issue, not a misunderstanding
  • How the issue can be reproduced: a repository or at least a code snippet
  • If RestSharp unexpectedly throws an exception, provide the stack trace

Contributing

Although issues are considered as contributions, we strongly suggest helping the community by solving issues that you experienced by submitting a pull request.

Here are contribution guidelines:

  • Make each pull request atomic and exclusive; don't send pull requests for a laundry list of changes.
  • Even better, commit in small manageable chunks.
  • Use the supplied .editorconfig file to format the code.
  • Any change must be accompanied by a unit test covering the change.
  • New tests are preferred to use FluentAssertions.
  • No regions.
  • No licence header for tested.
  • Code must build for .NET Standard 2.0, .NET 5, and .NET 6.
  • Test must run on .NET 6.
  • Use autocrlf=true (git config --global core.autocrlf true)

You can also support maintainers and motivate them by contributing financially at Open Collectiveopen in new window.

Common issues

Before opening an issue on GitHub, please check the list of known issues below.

Content type

One of the mistakes developers make when using RestSharp is setting the Content-Type header manually. Remember that in most of the usual scenarios setting the content type header manually is not required, and it might be harmful.

RestSharp sets the content type header automatically based on the request type. You might want to override the request body content type, but the best way to do it is to supply the content type to the body parameter itself. Functions for adding the request body to the request have overloads, which accept content type. For example

request.AddStringBody(jsonString, ContentType.Json);
1

Setting the User Agent

Setting the user agent on the request won't work when you use AddHeader.

Instead, please use the RestClientOptions.UserAgent property.

Empty response

We regularly get issues where developers complain that their requests get executed and they get a proper raw response, but the RestResponse<T> instance doesn't have a deserialized object set.

In other situations, the raw response is also empty.

All those issues are caused by the design choice to swallow exceptions that occur when RestSharp makes the request and processes the response. Instead, RestSharp produces so-called error response.

You can check the response status to find out if there are any errors. The following properties can tell you about those errors:

  • IsSuccessful
  • ResponseStatus
  • StatusCode
  • ErrorMessage
  • ErrorException

It could be that the request was executed and you got 200 OK status code back and some content, but the typed Data property is empty.

In that case, you probably got deserialization issues. By default, RestSharp will just return an empty (null) result in the Data property. Deserialization errors can be also populated to the error response. To do that, set the client.FailOnDeserializationError property to true.

It is also possible to force RestSharp to throw an exception.

If you set client.ThrowOnDeserializationError, RestSharp will throw a DeserializationException when the serializer throws. The exception has the internal exception and the response.

Finally, by setting ThrowOnAnyError you can force RestSharp to re-throw any exception that happens when making the request and processing the response.