HTTP CLIENT SERVICE START/STOP An HTTP client can be configured to start when starting the Inets application or started dynamically in runtime by calling the Inets application API inets:start(httpc, ServiceConfig) or inets:start(httpc, ServiceConfig, How), see inets(3). The configuration options are as follows: {profile, profile()} Name of the profile, see DATA TYPES. This option is mandatory. {data_dir, path()} Directory where the profile can save persistent data. If omitted, all cookies are treated as session cookies. The client can be stopped using inets:stop(httpc, Pid) or inets:stop(httpc, Profile).

profile() = atom()

The HTTP client default profile is started when the Inets application is started and is then available to all processes on that Erlang node.

In OTP 22 we introduced the new experimental socket API. The idea behind this API is to have a stable intermediary API that can be used to create features that are not part of the higher-level gen_* APIs. We have now come one step further in our plan to replace the inet driver by making it possible to use the gen_tcp API with socket as an optional back-end. To make it easy to test with existing code using gen_tcp a new option {inet_backend, socket | inet} can be used to select the socket implementation instead of the default inet implementation.