HttpGet

This is a tiny client that sends an HTTP GET request to the parameter that you specify on the command line. This is statically compiled, so it is useful to toss into distroless or scratch containers that need to have an HTTP client for health check purposes.

Why build this?

This project came to be because a friend wanted to run health checks in a distroless container, and I wanted to make a binary that was as small as it could be. I did a writeup about that process, so if you want more information please read this blog post.

It's also becoming a bigger trend to use either distroless containers, or containers based on scratch for security/image size reasons; this project allows a minimal dependency client that can only do GET requests, and has negligible footprint on container size.

Just how small is this?

Let's compare the binary size against other popular ones, specifically against wget and curl, measured from the binary & its dependencies in the alpine container

Binary	Size
`curl`	6.1mb
`wget`	1.4mb
`httpget`, no TLS	531kb
`httpget`, with `rustls`	1.2mb

So, all in all, it's quite minimal.

Installing HttpGet

Binaries are provided for both x86_84 and arm64 architectures, both as Docker images and as direct download from the Github Releases page.

Docker

Since this binary is primarily meant to be used for Docker health checks, the easiest way to consume this binary is through Docker. The binaries are published in the ghcr.io/cryptaliagy/httpget repository in scratch containers, and you can use the version tags or latest/latest-tls.

Any released version tag includes an equivalent tls tag. See below for an example Dockerfile, or see this project for an example usecase.

FROM golang:latest as build

# Build steps here
# (...)

# In the end we get a binary at /app/bin/example with our web service

FROM ghcr.io/cryptaliagy/httpget:latest as httpget

FROM scratch as runner

COPY --from=build /app/bin/example /example
COPY --from=httpget /httpget /httpget

HEALTHCHECK --interval=30s --timeout=30s --start-period=5s --retries=3 CMD ["/httpget", "http://localhost:8080/healthz"]

CMD ["/example"]

Another option is to put the httpget image before the build stage and copy it into the output directory for the build stage, so your final image is only a single layer:

FROM ghcr.io/cryptaliagy/httpget:latest as httpget

FROM golang:latest as build

# Build steps here
# (...)

# In the end we get a binary at /app/bin/example with our web service

COPY --from=httpget /httpget /app/bin/httpget

FROM scratch as runner

COPY --from=build /app/bin /bin

HEALTHCHECK --interval=30s --timeout=30s --start-period=5s --retries=3 CMD ["/bin/httpget", "http://localhost:8080/healthz"]

CMD ["/bin/example"]

Github Releases (Direct Download)

The regular binary and the TLS binary are available through Github Releases, and can be downloaded here. The httpget binary can only use http:// protocol URLs, and the httpget-tls can use either http:// or https://.

Install with Cargo

This project is published on crates.io, and can be installed using cargo with the command cargo install httpget. This will not produce a statically-linked binary: for that, you must ensure that you've installed the correct *-unknown-linux-musl target.

You can also clone this repository and run cargo install --path . to install through Cargo