HTTPie: a CLI, cURL-like tool for humans

v0.4.0-alpha (stable version)

HTTPie is a command line HTTP client. Its goal is to make CLI interaction with web services as human-friendly as possible. It provides a simple http command that allows for sending arbitrary HTTP requests using a simple and natural syntax, and displays colorized responses. HTTPie can be used for testing, debugging, and generally interacting with HTTP servers.

HTTPie is written in Python, and under the hood it uses the excellent Requests and Pygments libraries.

Table of Contents

Main Features

Expressive and intuitive syntax
Formatted and colorized terminal output
Built-in JSON support
Forms and file uploads
HTTPS, proxies, and authentication
Arbitrary request data
Custom headers
Persistent sessions
Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.x support
Linux, Mac OS X and Windows support
Documentation
Test coverage

Installation

The latest stable version of HTTPie can always be installed or updated to via pip (prefered) or easy_install:

$ pip install --upgrade httpie

Alternatively:

$ easy_install httpie

Or, you can install the development version directly from GitHub:

$ pip install --upgrade https://github.com/jkbr/httpie/tarball/master

There are also packages available for Ubuntu, Debian, and possibly other Linux distributions as well. However, there may be a significant delay between official HTTPie releases and package updates.

Usage

Hello World:

$ http httpie.org

Synopsis:

$ http [flags] [METHOD] URL [ITEM [ITEM]]

Examples

Custom HTTP method, HTTP headers and JSON data:

$ http PUT example.org X-API-Token:123 name=John

Submitting forms:

$ http -f POST example.org hello=World

See the request that is being sent using one of the output options:

$ http -v example.org

Use Github API to post a comment on an issue with authentication:

$ http -a USERNAME POST https://api.github.com/repos/jkbr/httpie/issues/83/comments body='HTTPie is awesome!'

Upload a file using redirected input:

$ http example.org < file.json

Download a file and save it via redirected output:

$ http example.org/file > file

Use named sessions to make certain aspects or the communication persistent between requests to the same host:

$ http --session=logged-in -a username:password httpbin.org/get API-Key:123

$ http --session=logged-in httpbin.org/headers

What follows is a detailed documentation. It covers the command syntax, advanced usage, and also features additional examples.

HTTP Method

The name of the HTTP method comes right before the URL argument:

$ http DELETE example.org/todos/7

Which looks similar to the actual Request-Line that is sent:

DELETE /todos/7 HTTP/1.1

When the METHOD argument is omitted from the command, HTTPie defaults to either GET (with no request data) or POST (with request data).

Request URL

The only information HTTPie needs to perform a request is a URL. The default scheme is, somewhat unsurprisingly, http://, and can be omitted from the argument – http example.org works just fine.

If find yourself manually constructing URLs with querystring parameters on the terminal, you may appreciate the param==value syntax for appending URL parameters so that you don't have to worry about escaping the & separators. To search for HTTPie on Google Images you could use this command:

$ http GET www.google.com search==HTTPie tbm==isch

GET /?search=HTTPie&tbm=isch HTTP/1.1

Request Items

There are five different request item types that provide a convenient mechanism for specifying HTTP headers, simple JSON and form data, files, and URL parameters.

They are key/value pairs specified after the URL. All have in common that they become part of the actual request that is sent and that their type is distinguished only by the separator used: :, =, :=, @, and ==.

Item Type	Description
HTTP Headers `Name:Value`	Arbitrary HTTP header, e.g. `X-API-Token:123`.
URL parameters `name==value`	Appends the given name/value pair as a query string parameter to the URL. The `==` separator is used
Data Fields `field=value`	Request data fields to be serialized as a JSON object (default), or to be form encoded (`--form` / `-f`).
Raw JSON fields `field:=json`	Useful when sending JSON and one or more fields need to be a `Boolean`, `Number`, nested `Object`, or an `Array`, e.g., `meals:='["ham","spam"]'` or `pies:=[1,2,3]` (note the quotes).
Files `field@/dir/file`	Only available with `-f` / `--form`. For example `screenshot@~/Pictures/img.png`. The presence of a file field results in a `multipart/form-data` request.

You can use \ to escape characters that shouldn't be used as separators (or parts thereof). For instance, foo\==bar will become a data key/value pair (foo= and bar) instead of a URL parameter.

Note that data fields aren't the only way to specify request data: Redirected input allows for passing arbitrary data to be sent with the request.

JSON

JSON is the lingua franca of modern web services and it is also the implicit content type HTTPie by default uses:

If your command includes some data items, they are serialized as a JSON object by default. HTTPie also automatically sets the following headers, both of which can be overwritten:

`Content-Type`	`application/json; charset=utf-8`
`Accept`	`application/json`

You can use --json / -j to explicitly set Accept to application/json regardless of whether you are sending data (it's a shortcut for setting the header via the usual header notation – http url Accept:application/json).

Simple example:

$ http PUT example.org name=John email=john@example.org

PUT / HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Accept-Encoding: identity, deflate, compress, gzip
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Host: example.org
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.2.7dev

{
    "name": "John",
    "email": "john@example.org"
}

Non-string fields use the := separator, which allows you to embed raw JSON into the resulting object:

$ http PUT api.example.com/person/1 name=John age:=29 married:=false hobbies:='["http", "pies"]'

PUT /person/1 HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Host: api.example.com
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.2.7dev

{
    "age": 29,
    "hobbies": [
        "http",
        "pies"
    ],
    "married": false,
    "name": "John"
}

Send JSON data stored in a file (see redirected input for more examples):

$ http POST api.example.com/person/1 < person.json

Forms

Submitting forms is very similar to sending JSON requests. Often the only difference is in adding the --form / -f option, which ensures that data fields are serialized as, and Content-Type is set to, application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8.

It is possible to make form data the implicit content type instead of JSON via the config file.

Regular Forms

$ http --form POST api.example.org/person/1 name='John Smith' email=john@example.org

POST /person/1 HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.2.7dev
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8

name=John+Smith&email=john%40example.org

File Upload Forms

If one or more file fields is present, the serialization and content type is multipart/form-data:

$ http -f POST example.com/jobs name='John Smith' cv@~/Documents/cv.pdf

The request above is the same as if the following HTML form were submitted:

<form enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post" action="http://example.com/jobs">
    <input type="text" name="name" />
    <input type="file" name="cv" />
</form>

HTTP Headers

To set custom headers you can use the Header:Value notation:

$ http example.org  User-Agent:Bacon/1.0  Cookie:valued-visitor=yes  X-Foo:Bar  Referer:http://httpie.org/

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: identity, deflate, compress, gzip
Cookie: valued-visitor=yes
Host: example.org
Referer: http://httpie.org/
User-Agent: Bacon/1.0
X-Foo: Bar

There are a couple of default headers that HTTPie sets:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: identity, deflate, compress, gzip
User-Agent: HTTPie/<version>
Host: <taken-from-URL>

Any of the default headers can be overwritten.

Authentication

The currently supported authentication schemes are Basic and Digest (more to come). There are two flags that control authentication:

`--auth, -a`	Pass a `username:password` pair as the argument. Or, if you only specify a username (`-a username`), you'll be prompted for the password before the request is sent. To send a an empty password, pass `username:`. The `username:password@hostname` URL syntax is supported as well (but credentials passed via `-a` have higher priority).
`--auth-type`	Specify the auth mechanism. Possible values are `basic` and `digest`. The default value is `basic` so it can often be omitted.

Authorization information from .netrc is honored as well.

Basic auth:

$ http -a username:password example.org

Digest auth:

$ http --auth-type=digest -a username:password example.org

With password prompt:

$ http -a username example.org

Proxies

You can specify proxies to be used through the --proxy argument:

$ http --proxy=http:10.10.1.10:3128 --https:10.10.1.10:1080 example.org

With Basic authentication:

$ http --proxy=http:http://user:pass@10.10.1.10:3128 example.org

You can also configure proxies by environment variables HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY, and the underlying Requests library will pick them up as well. If you want to disable proxies configured through the environment variables for certain hosts, you can specify them in NO_PROXY.

In your ~/.bash_profile:

export HTTP_PROXY=10.10.1.10:3128
export HTTPS_PROXY=10.10.1.10:1080
export NO_PROXY=localhost,example.com

HTTPS

To skip the host's SSL certificate verification, you can pass --verify=no (default is yes). You can also use --verify to set a custom CA bundle path. The path can also be configured via the environment variable REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE.

Output Options

By default, HTTPie outputs the whole response message (headers as well as the body).

You can control what should be printed via several options:

`--headers, -h`	Only the response headers are printed.
`--body, -b`	Only the response body is printed.
`--verbose, -v`	Print the whole HTTP exchange (request and response).
`--print, -p`	Selects parts of the HTTP exchange.

--verbose can often be useful for debugging the request and generating documentation examples:

$ http --verbose PUT httpbin.org/put hello=world
PUT /put HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Accept-Encoding: identity, deflate, compress, gzip
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Host: httpbin.org
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.2.7dev

{
    "hello": "world"
}


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 477
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2012 00:25:23 GMT
Server: gunicorn/0.13.4

{
    […]
}

All the other options are just a shortcut for --print / -p. It accepts a string of characters each of which represents a specific part of the HTTP exchange:

Character	Stands for
`H`	Request headers.
`B`	Request body.
`h`	Response headers.
`b`	Response body.

Print request and response headers:

$ http --print=Hh PUT httpbin.org/put hello=world

Conditional Body Download

As an optimization, the response body is downloaded from the server only if it's part of the output. This is similar to performing a HEAD request, except that it applies to any HTTP method you use.

Let's say that there is an API that returns the whole resource when it is updated, but you are only interested in the response headers to see the status code after an update:

$ http --headers PATCH example.org/Really-Huge-Resource name='New Name'

Since we are only printing the HTTP headers here, the connection to the server is closed as soon as all the response headers have been received. Therefore, bandwidth and time isn't wasted downloading the body which you don't care about.

The response headers are downloaded always, even if they are not part of the output

Redirected Input

A universal method for passing request data is through redirected stdin (standard input). Such data is buffered and then with no further processing used as the request body. There are multiple useful ways to use piping:

Redirect from a file:

$ http PUT example.com/person/1 X-API-Token:123 < person.json

Or the output of another program:

$ grep /var/log/httpd/error_log '401 Unauthorized' | http POST example.org/intruders

You can use echo for simple data:

$ echo '{"name": "John"}' | http PATCH example.com/person/1 X-API-Token:123

You can even pipe web services together using HTTPie:

$ http GET https://api.github.com/repos/jkbr/httpie | http POST httpbin.org/post

You can use cat to enter multiline data on the terminal:

$ cat | http POST example.com
<paste>
^D

$ cat | http POST example.com/todos Content-Type:text/plain
- buy milk
- call parents
^D

On OS X, you can send the contents of the clipboard with pbpaste:

$ pbpaste | http PUT example.com

Passing data through stdin cannot be combined with data fields specified on the command line.

Body Data From a Filename

An alternative to redirected stdin is specifying a filename (as @/path/to/file) whose content is used as if it came from stdin.

It has the advantage that the Content-Type header is automatically set to the appropriate value based on the filename extension. For example, the following request sends the verbatim contents of that XML file with Content-Type: application/xml:

$ http PUT httpbin.org/put @/data/file.xml

Terminal Output

HTTPie does several things by default in order to make its terminal output easy to read.

Colors and Formatting

Syntax highlighting is applied to HTTP headers and bodies (where it makes sense). You can choose your prefered color scheme via the --style option if you don't like the default one (see $ http --help for the possible values).

Also, the following formatting is applied:

HTTP headers are sorted by name.
JSON data is indented, sorted by keys, and unicode escapes are converted to the characters they represent.

One of these options can be used to control output processing:

`--pretty=all`	Apply both colors and formatting. Default for terminal output.
`--pretty=colors`	Apply colors.
`--pretty=format`	Apply formatting.
`--pretty=none`	Disables output processing. Default for redirected output.

Binary data

Binary data is suppressed for terminal output, which makes it safe to perform requests to URLs that send back binary data. Binary data is suppressed also in redirected, but prettified output. The connection is closed as soon as we know that the response body is binary,

$ http example.org/Movie.mov

You will nearly instantly see something like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: video/quicktime
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

+-----------------------------------------+
| NOTE: binary data not shown in terminal |
+-----------------------------------------+

Redirected Output

HTTPie uses different defaults for redirected output than for terminal output:

Formatting and colors aren't applied (unless --pretty is specified).
Only the response body is printed (unless one of the output options is set).
Also, binary data isn't suppressed.

The reason is to make piping HTTPie's output to another programs and downloading files work with no extra flags. Most of the time, only the raw response body is of an interest when the output is redirected.

Download a file:

$ http example.org/Movie.mov > Movie.mov

Download an image of Octocat, resize it using ImageMagick, upload it elsewhere:

$ http octodex.github.com/images/original.jpg | convert - -resize 25% -  | http example.org/Octocats

Force colorizing and formatting, and show both the request and the response in less pager:

$ http --pretty=all --verbose example.org | less -R

The -R flag tells less to interpret color escape sequences included HTTPie`s output.

You can create a shortcut for invoking HTTPie with colorized and paged output by adding the following to your ~/.bash_profile:

function httpless {
    # `httpless example.org'
    http --pretty=all "$@" | less -R;
}

Streamed Responses

Responses are downloaded and printed in chunks, which allows for streaming and large file downloads without using too much RAM. However, when colors and formatting is applied, the whole response is buffered and only then processed at once.

You can use the --stream, -S flag to make two things happen:

The output is flushed in much smaller chunks without any buffering, which makes HTTPie behave kind of like tail -f for URLs.
Streaming becomes enabled even when the output is prettified: It will be applied to each line of the response and flushed immediately. This makes it possible to have a nice output for long-lived requests, such as one to the Twitter streaming API.

Prettified streamed response:

$ http --stream -f -a YOUR-TWITTER-NAME https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/filter.json track='Justin Bieber'

Streamed output by small chunks alá tail -f:

# Send each new tweet (JSON object) mentioning "Apple" to another
# server as soon as it arrives from the Twitter streaming API:
$ http --stream -f -a YOUR-TWITTER-NAME https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/filter.json track=Apple \
| while read tweet; do echo "$tweet" | http POST example.org/tweets ; done

Sessions

By default, every request is completely independent of the previous ones. HTTPie also supports persistent sessions, where custom headers, authorization, and cookies (manually specified or sent by the server) persist between requests to the same host.

Create a new session named user1:

$ http --session=user1 -a user1:password example.org X-Foo:Bar

Now you can refer to the session by its name, and the previously used authorization and HTTP headers will automatically be set:

$ http --session=user1 example.org

To create or reuse a different session, simple specify a different name:

$ http --session=user2 -a user2:password example.org X-Bar:Foo

To use a session without updating it from the request/response exchange once it is created, specify the session name via --session-read-only=SESSION_NAME instead.

Sessions are stored as JSON files in ~/.httpie/sessions/<host>/<name>.json (%APPDATA%\httpie\sessions\<host>\<name>.json on Windows).

Config

HTTPie uses a simple configuration file that contains a JSON object with the following keys:

__meta__

HTTPie automatically stores some metadata here. Do not change.

implicit_content_type

A String specifying the implicit content type for request data. The default value for this option is json and can be changed to form.

default_options

An Array (by default empty) of options that should be applied to every request.

For instance, you can use this option to change the default style and output options: "default_options": ["--style=fruity", "--body"] Default options from config file can be unset via --no-OPTION arguments passed on the command line (e.g., --no-style would unset fruity as the default style for the particular invocation).

The default location is ~/.httpie/config.json (%APPDATA%\httpie\config.json on Windows).

The config directory location can be changed by setting the HTTPIE_CONFIG_DIR environment variable.

Management Tool

The main executable HTTPie comes with is http, which is used for making HTTP requests. The httpie command, on the other hand, is a utility for managing your configuration. The currently supported actions are:

httpie session list [hostname [session-name]]
httpie session edit hostname session-name
httpie session show hostname session-name
httpie session delete hostname [session-name]

Scripting

When using HTTPie from shell scripts, it can be handy to set the --check-status flag. It instructs HTTPie to exit with an error if the HTTP status is one of 3xx, 4xx, or 5xx. The exit status will be 3 (unless --follow is set), 4, or 5, respectively. Also, the --timeout option allows to overwrite the default 30s timeout:

#!/bin/bash

if http --timeout=2.5 --check-status HEAD example.org/health &> /dev/null; then
    echo 'OK!'
else
    case $? in
        2) echo 'Request timed out!' ;;
        3) echo 'Unexpected HTTP 3xx Redirection!' ;;
        4) echo 'HTTP 4xx Client Error!' ;;
        5) echo 'HTTP 5xx Server Error!' ;;
        *) echo 'Other Error!' ;;
    esac
fi

Interface Design

The syntax of the command arguments closely corresponds to the actual HTTP requests sent over the wire. It has the advantage that it's easy to remember and read. It is often possible to translate an HTTP request to an HTTPie argument list just by inlining the request elements. For example, compare this HTTP request:

POST /collection HTTP/1.1
X-API-Key: 123
User-Agent: Bacon/1.0
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

name=value&name2=value2

with the HTTPie command that sends it:

$ http -f POST example.org/collection \
  X-API-Key:123 \
  User-Agent:Bacon/1.0 \
  name=value \
  name2=value2

Notice that both the order of elements and the syntax is very similar, and that only a small portion of the command is used to control HTTPie and doesn't directly correspond to any part of the request (here it's only -f asking HTTPie to send a form request).

The two modes, --pretty=all (default for terminal) and --pretty=none (default for redirected output), allow for both user-friendly interactive use and usage from scripts, where HTTPie serves as a generic HTTP client.

As HTTPie is still under heavy development, the existing command line syntax and some of the --OPTIONS may change slightly before HTTPie reaches its final version 1.0. All changes are recorded in the changelog.

Contribute

Bug reports and code and documentation patches are greatly appretiated. You can also help by using the development version of HTTPie and reporting any bugs you might encounter.

Before working on a new feature or a bug, please browse the existing issues to see whether it has been previously discussed. If the change in question is a bigger one, it's always good to discuss before your starting working on it.

Then fork and clone the repository.

It's very useful to point the http command to your local branch during development. To do so, install HTTPie with pip in editable mode:

$ pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall --editable .

Please run the existing suite of tests before a pull request is submitted:

python setup.py test

Tox can also be used to conveniently run tests in all of the supported Python environments:

# Install tox
pip install tox

# Run tests
tox

Don't forget to add yourself to AUTHORS.rst.

Authors

Jakub Roztocil (@jakubroztocil) created HTTPie and these fine people have contributed.

Licence

Please see LICENSE.

Changelog

You can click a version name to see a diff with the previous one.

believe3301/httpie