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# Transport

## Overview

A **Transport** carries JSON-RPC requests for a [Client](/docs/clients). Its configuration includes a
`key`, `name`, `type`, and `setup` function.

The Client calls `setup` to create a request function with retry and duplicate-request handling.

Viem provides transports for common protocols and composable transports that wrap other
Transports:

* **Wire transports**: [`http`](/docs/transports/http), [`webSocket`](/docs/transports/websocket), [`ipc`](/docs/transports/ipc), and [`custom`](/docs/transports/custom) (EIP-1193).
* **Composing transports**: [`fallback`](/docs/transports/fallback), [`loadBalance`](/docs/transports/load-balance), and [`rateLimit`](/docs/transports/rate-limit) wrap one or more transports.

Each Transport has a top-level convenience export, such as `http`. The same function is available
on the `Transport` namespace as `Transport.http`.

```ts twoslash
import { Client, http } from 'viem'
import { mainnet } from 'viem/chains'

const client = Client.create({
  chain: mainnet,
  transport: http('https://eth.merkle.io'),
})
```

<Cards>
  <Card title="HTTP" description="JSON-RPC over HTTP, with optional request batching." icon="lucide:globe" to="/docs/transports/http" />

  <Card title="WebSocket" description="JSON-RPC over a reconnecting WebSocket, with subscriptions." icon="lucide:cable" to="/docs/transports/websocket" />

  <Card title="IPC" description="JSON-RPC over a local IPC socket (Node only)." icon="lucide:plug" to="/docs/transports/ipc" />

  <Card title="Custom (EIP-1193)" description="Wrap any EIP-1193-compatible provider as a transport." icon="lucide:puzzle" to="/docs/transports/custom" />

  <Card title="Fallback" description="Chain through transports, falling through on error." icon="lucide:list-ordered" to="/docs/transports/fallback" />

  <Card title="Load Balance" description="Round-robin requests across a list of transports." icon="lucide:scale" to="/docs/transports/load-balance" />

  <Card title="Rate Limit" description="Throttle a transport to a fixed requests-per-second budget." icon="lucide:gauge" to="/docs/transports/rate-limit" />
</Cards>