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
- Installation
- Usage
- HTTP Method
- Request URL
- Request Items
- JSON
- Forms
- HTTP Headers
- Authentication
- Proxies
- HTTPS
- Output Options
- Redirected Input
- Terminal Output
- Redirected Output
- Streamed Responses
- Sessions
- Config
- Management Tool
- Scripting
- Interface Design
- Contribute
- Authors
- Licence
- Changelog
- 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
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.
Hello World:
$ http httpie.org
Synopsis:
$ http [flags] [METHOD] URL [ITEM [ITEM]]
See also http --help
.
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.
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).
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
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 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 protected]
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": "[email protected]"
}
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
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.
$ http --form POST api.example.org/person/1 name='John Smith' [email protected]
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
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>
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.
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
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:[email protected]: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
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
.
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
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
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.
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
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 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 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 |
+-----------------------------------------+
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;
}
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
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).
See also management tool and 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 For instance, you can use this option to change
the default style and output options:
|
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.
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]
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
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.
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.
Jakub Roztocil (@jakubroztocil) created HTTPie and these fine people have contributed.
Please see LICENSE.
You can click a version name to see a diff with the previous one.
- 0.4.0-alpha
- Added support for credentials in URL.
- Added
--no-option
for every--option
to be config-friendly. - Mutually exclusive arguments can be specified multiple times. The last value is used.
- 0.3.0 (2012-09-21)
- Allow output redirection on Windows.
- Added configuration file.
- Added persistent session support.
- Renamed
--allow-redirects
to--follow
. - Improved the usability of
http --help
. - Fixed installation on Windows with Python 3.
- Fixed colorized output on Windows with Python 3.
- CRLF HTTP header field separation in the output.
- Added exit status code
2
for timed-out requests. - Added the option to separate colorizing and formatting
(
--pretty=all
,--pretty=colors
and--pretty=format
).--ugly
has bee removed in favor of--pretty=none
.
- 0.2.7 (2012-08-07)
- Compatibility with Requests 0.13.6.
- Streamed terminal output.
--stream
/-S
can be used to enable streaming also with--pretty
and to ensure a more frequent output flushing. - Support for efficient large file downloads.
- Sort headers by name (unless
--pretty=none
). - Response body is fetched only when needed (e.g., not with
--headers
). - Improved content type matching.
- Updated Solarized color scheme.
- Windows: Added
--output FILE
to store output into a file (piping results in corrupted data on Windows). - Proper handling of binary requests and responses.
- Fixed printing of
multipart/form-data
requests. - Renamed
--traceback
to--debug
.
- 0.2.6 (2012-07-26)
- The short option for
--headers
is now-h
(-t
has been removed, for usage use--help
). - Form data and URL parameters can have multiple fields with the same name (e.g.,``http -f url a=1 a=2``).
- Added
--check-status
to exit with an error on HTTP 3xx, 4xx and 5xx (3, 4, and 5, respectively). - If the output is piped to another program or redirected to a file,
the default behaviour is to only print the response body.
(It can still be overwritten via the
--print
flag.) - Improved highlighting of HTTP headers.
- Added query string parameters (
param==value
). - Added support for terminal colors under Windows.
- The short option for
- 0.2.5 (2012-07-17)
- Unicode characters in prettified JSON now don't get escaped for improved readability.
- --auth now prompts for a password if only a username provided.
- Added support for request payloads from a file path with automatic
Content-Type
(http URL @/path
). - Fixed missing query string when displaying the request headers via
--verbose
. - Fixed Content-Type for requests with no data.
- 0.2.1 (2012-06-13)
- Added compatibility with
requests-0.12.1
. - Dropped custom JSON and HTTP lexers in favor of the ones newly included
in
pygments-1.5
.
- Added compatibility with
- 0.2.0 (2012-04-25)
- Added Python 3 support.
- Added the ability to print the HTTP request as well as the response
(see
--print
and--verbose
). - Added support for Digest authentication.
- Added file upload support
(
http -f POST file_field_name@/path/to/file
). - Improved syntax highlighting for JSON.
- Added support for field name escaping.
- Many bug fixes.
- 0.1.6 (2012-03-04)