HTTPie (pronounced aych-tee-tee-pie) 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 output. 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.
- 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
- Wget-like downloads
- Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.x support
- Linux, Mac OS X and Windows support
- Plugins
- Documentation
- Test coverage
On Mac OS X, HTTPie can be installed via Homebrew:
Most Linux distributions provide a package that can be installed using the system package manager, e.g.:
A universal installation method (that works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, …, and provides the latest version) is to use pip:
(If pip
installation fails for some reason, you can try easy_install httpie
as a fallback.)
The latest development version can be installed directly from GitHub:
Hello World:
Synopsis:
See also http --help
.
Custom HTTP method, HTTP headers and JSON data:
Submitting forms:
See the request that is being sent using one of the output options:
Use Github API to post a comment on an issue with authentication:
Upload a file using redirected input:
Download a file and save it via redirected output:
Download a file wget
style:
Use named sessions to make certain aspects or the communication persistent between requests to the same host:
Set a custom Host
header to work around missing DNS records:
What follows is a detailed documentation. It covers the command syntax, advanced usage, and also features additional examples.
The name of the HTTP method comes right before the URL argument:
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).
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.
Additionally, curl-like shorthand for localhost is supported. This means that, for example :3000
would expand to http://localhost:3000
If the port is omitted, then port 80 is assumed.
GET /foo HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
GET /bar HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:3000
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
If you 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:
GET /?search=HTTPie&tbm=isch HTTP/1.1
There are a few 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 :=@
. The ones with an @
expect a file path as value.
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 , field=@file.txt |
Request data fields to be serialized as a JSON object (default), or to be form-encoded (--form, -f ). |
Raw JSON fields field:=json , field:=@file.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). |
Form File Fields field@/dir/file |
Only available with --form, -f . 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.
You can also quote values, e.g. foo="bar baz"
.
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 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 |
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:
PUT / HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/json
Host: example.org
{
"name": "John",
"email": "john@example.org"
}
Non-string fields use the :=
separator, which allows you to embed raw JSON into the resulting object. Text and raw JSON files can also be embedded into fields using =@
and :=@
:
PUT /person/1 HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Content-Type: application/json
Host: api.example.com
{
"age": 29,
"hobbies": [
"http",
"pies"
],
"description": "John is a nice guy who likes pies.",
"married": false,
"name": "John",
"bookmarks": {
"HTTPie": "http://httpie.org",
}
}
Send JSON data stored in a file (see redirected input for more examples):
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.
POST /person/1 HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8
name=John+Smith&email=john%40example.org&cv=John's+CV+...
If one or more file fields is present, the serialization and content type is multipart/form-data
:
The request above is the same as if the following HTML form were submitted:
Note that @
is used to simulate a file upload form field, whereas =@
just embeds the file content as a regular text field value.
To set custom headers you can use the Header:Value
notation:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Cookie: valued-visitor=yes;foo=bar
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: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: HTTPie/<version>
Host: <taken-from-URL>
Any of the default headers can be overwritten.
The currently supported authentication schemes are Basic and Digest (see auth plugins for more). There are two flags that control authentication:
|
Pass a |
|
Specify the auth mechanism. Possible values are |
Basic auth:
Digest auth:
With password prompt:
Authorization information from your ~/.netrc
file is honored as well:
- httpie-oauth: OAuth
- httpie-ntlm: NTLM (NT LAN Manager)
- httpie-negotiate: SPNEGO (GSS Negotiate)
- requests-hawk: Hawk
- httpie-api-auth: ApiAuth
- httpie-edgegrid: EdgeGrid
- httpie-jwt-auth: JWTAuth (JSON Web Tokens)
You can specify proxies to be used through the --proxy
argument for each protocol (which is included in the value in case of redirects across protocols):
With Basic authentication:
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
:
To skip the host's SSL certificate verification, you can pass --verify=no
(default is yes
):
You can also use --verify=<CA_BUNDLE_PATH>
to set a custom CA bundle path:
The path can also be configured via the environment variable REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE
(picked up by the underlying python-requests library):
To use a client side certificate for the SSL communication, you can pass the path of the cert file with --cert
:
If the private key is not contained in the cert file you may pass the path of the key file with --cert-key
:
If you use HTTPie with Python < 2.7.9 (can be verified with python --version
) and need to talk to servers that use SNI (Server Name Indication) you need to install some additional dependencies:
You can use the following command to test SNI support:
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: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/json
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:
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:
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
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:
Or the output of another program:
You can use echo
for simple data:
You can even pipe web services together using HTTPie:
You can use cat
to enter multiline data on the terminal:
On OS X, you can send the contents of the clipboard with pbpaste
:
Passing data through stdin
cannot be combined with data fields specified on the command line:
To prevent HTTPie from reading stdin
data you can use the --ignore-stdin
option.
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
:
HTTPie does several things by default in order to make its terminal output easy to read.
Syntax highlighting is applied to HTTP headers and bodies (where it makes sense). You can choose your preferred 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.
- XML data is indented for better readability.
One of these options can be used to control output processing:
|
Apply both colors and formatting. Default for terminal output. |
--pretty=colors |
Apply colors. |
--pretty=format |
Apply formatting. |
|
Disables output processing. Default for redirected output. |
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,
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 |
+-----------------------------------------+
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:
Download an image of Octocat, resize it using ImageMagick, upload it elsewhere:
Force colorizing and formatting, and show both the request and the response in less
pager:
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
:
HTTPie features a download mode in which it acts similarly to wget
.
When enabled using the --download, -d
flag, response headers are printed to the terminal (stderr
), and a progress bar is shown while the response body is being saved to a file.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=jkbrzt-httpie-0.4.1-33-gfc4f70a.tar.gz
Content-Length: 505530
Content-Type: application/x-gzip
Server: GitHub.com
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Downloading 494.89 kB to "jkbrzt-httpie-0.4.1-33-gfc4f70a.tar.gz"
/ 21.01% 104.00 kB 47.55 kB/s 0:00:08 ETA
If not provided via --output, -o
, the output filename will be determined from Content-Disposition
(if available), or from the URL and Content-Type
. If the guessed filename already exists, HTTPie adds a unique suffix to it.
You can also redirect the response body to another program while the response headers and progress are still shown in the terminal:
If --output, -o
is specified, you can resume a partial download using the --continue, -c
option. This only works with servers that support Range
requests and 206 Partial Content
responses. If the server doesn't support that, the whole file will simply be downloaded:
Other notes:
- The
--download
option only changes how the response body is treated. - You can still set custom headers, use sessions,
--verbose, -v
, etc. --download
always implies--follow
(redirects are followed).- HTTPie exits with status code
1
(error) if the body hasn't been fully downloaded. Accept-Encoding
cannot be set with--download
.
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:
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
By default, every request is completely independent of any previous ones. HTTPie also supports persistent sessions, where custom headers (except for the ones starting with Content-
or If-
), authorization, and cookies (manually specified or sent by the server) persist between requests to the same host.
Create a new session named user1
for example.org
:
Now you can refer to the session by its name, and the previously used authorization and HTTP headers will automatically be set:
To create or reuse a different session, simple specify a different name:
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.
Named sessions' data is stored in JSON files in the directory ~/.httpie/sessions/<host>/<name>.json
(%APPDATA%\httpie\sessions\<host>\<name>.json
on Windows).
Instead of a name, you can also directly specify a path to a session file. This allows for sessions to be re-used across multiple hosts:
Warning: All session data, including credentials, cookie data, and custom headers are stored in plain text.
Note that session files can also be created and edited manually in a text editor; they are plain JSON.
See also Config.
HTTPie uses a simple configuration file that contains a JSON object with the following keys:
|
HTTPie automatically stores some metadata here. Do not change. |
|
A |
|
An For instance, you can use this option to change the default style and output options: Another useful default option is Default options from config file can be unset for a particular invocation via |
The default location of the configuration file is ~/.httpie/config.json
(or %APPDATA%\httpie\config.json
on Windows).
The config directory location can be changed by setting the HTTPIE_CONFIG_DIR
environment variable.
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.
The --ignore-stdin
option prevents HTTPie from reading data from stdin
, which is usually not desirable during non-interactive invocations.
Also, the --timeout
option allows to overwrite the default 30s timeout:
#!/bin/bash
if http --check-status --ignore-stdin --timeout=2.5 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
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:
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 change log.
Jakub Roztocil (@jkbrzt) created HTTPie and these fine people have contributed.
Please see claudiatd/httpie-artwork
Please see CONTRIBUTING.
Please see CHANGELOG.
Please see LICENSE.