fire

A HTTP request client for your terminal

Usage

Execute a request

fire my_request.yml

Execute a request for a specific environment

fire my_request.yml -e environment

Request Files

A request file uses YAML (.yml) syntax and contains the following properties

Property	Required	Example Value
method	Yes	`POST`
url	Yes	`https://42x.io/some-endpoint`
headers	No	`content-type: application/json`
body	No	`{ "foo": "bar" }`

# This is a comment that can be used as a description for the request file
method: POST
url: https://42x.io/some-endpoint
headers:
  accept: application/json
  # Headers `host`, `content-length` (if there is a body) and `user-agent` are always sent
  # since a lot of requests will fail without them.
  content-type: application/json
  x-correlation-id: ce19f5b6-6333-4004-a191-67476fe241be

body: |
  {
    "foo": "bar",
    "nice_primes": [977, 3457, 3457, 6133, 7919]
  }

A more complex example with templating (using Handlebars syntax)

method: GET
url: https://{{DOMAIN_NAME}}/some-endpoint?user={{USER}}
headers:
  accept: application/json
  authorization: Bearer {{TOKEN}}

See examples directory for more examples of how to structure request files.

Templating and Variable Substitution

Request files supports templating where variables can be substituted at execution time. This makes it very easy to have request files that can be re-used for different environments or contexts. Variables can be read from the following sources (from least priority to highest priority):

Environment variables - environment variables in your system are accessed by the application and will be used, but only as last resort if they cannot be found anywhere else
Global environment files - any file named exactly .env or .sec which is present in the same directory or parent directories of the request file
Environment specific files - any file matching the specific environment (like development.env or development.sec if the environment is development) which is present in the same directory or parent directories of the request file, when an environment is specified (using flag -e)
Command line arguments - variables supplied to the application at the command line at execution time (using flag -E), these will override any of the previous sources for variables

The priority of resolved environment files are such as that the any environment file in the same folder as the request file has the highest priority when resolving variables (if the same variable is defined in multiple places). Found files in parent directories will be considered as well, but the futher up they are found the lower priority they will have. If the request files are stored in a Git repository, the application will never consider files outside the repository. If the request is not stored in a Git repository, only the immediate directory and no parents will be considered.

It is possible to specify multiple environments with the --environment (-e) flag, if needed. The order in which the different environments variables are applied are undefined, so it is recommended that you do not have the same variable defined in multiple environments if you are going to use them at the same time.

Note that there is technically not any difference between files ending with .env and .sec. Having two different file endings for environment configuration allows you to have the convention of putting sensitive variables in .sec files while having non-sensitive configuration in .env files. It is highly recommended that you add a .gitignore filter to your repository which is *.sec, so you do not accidentally commit any secrets.

Example of file which contains "environment variables"

API_URL=https://url-to-some.api.com/api
REGION=europe
USERNAME="quoted-username"

Additional Documentation

See fire --help for more documentation on how to use the application.

Building

Install Rust - if you do not have it installed
Clone this repository - git clone git@github.com:mantono/fire.git
Build application - cargo build --release inside the root of the repository
Install application - cargo install --path .

williamhogman/fire