Show HN: Prestige, a text based HTTP client, for working with HTTP APIs

by sharat87 • 5 years ago

117 38 5 years ago

sharat8718• 5 years ago

This is an HTTP client devtool, similar to Postman or Insomnia, but completely text-based. I've been developing it, using it for over a year now, as a weekend project. It's open source, hosted at GitHub, https://github.com/sharat87/prestige.

Hope you like it.

tony-allan• 5 years ago

This is a really great idea. Well done!

sharat8718• 5 years ago

Thank you very much. :)

samvher• 5 years ago

What do you use it for?

The syntax looks simple, and the results are clearly formatted - just trying to understand what kind of workflow makes this favorable to something like curl or python-requests.

sharat8718• 5 years ago

Hey, thanks for asking.

I use this to play with and test APIs I'm developing, or APIs that I want to develop against. For example. GitHub has a public API that can be used to access repositories and details about the repositories. I use Prestige to try out an example request, and tune the request to get the exact response that I want and _then_ translate it to use python-requests (if I want to use it in Python) or something else.

scrollaway• 5 years ago

This is clearly a labour of love. Well done, congrats on releasing :)

sharat8718• 5 years ago

Thank you so much :)

nexuist3• 5 years ago

I love this! Excellent combination of GUI and textarea. Does it keep working if you cmd+save it locally?

sharat8718• 5 years ago

Hey! Thank you very much. I haven't actually thought about it. My gut feeling says it _won't_, but I'm not able to point out a reason. But that's a good idea, I do want to have a local version of this someday, perhaps it could be that simple?

nexuist3• 5 years ago

From poking around it doesn't seem like you're using a framework like React or Vue - if this is straight HTML/CSS/JS it should be possible to just save the page and all its dependencies and it would work flawlessly (minus the OAuth integration which would need a backend to host a redirect URI).

alanpearce• 5 years ago

A very similar project for Emacs users: https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el

sharat8718• 5 years ago

Ah! Yes, thanks for sharing. I should've guessed this existed for Emacs as well. I played around with implementing a similar concept like this in Vim, in 2019 (link: https://github.com/sharat87/roast.vim). Unfortunately, while I love Vim as an editor, I couldn't do a lot of features that I wanted. So I moved to the browser and built Prestige :)

marco_craveiro• 5 years ago

Rest client is great, but a lot of the cool (emacs) kids have moved over to verb-mode [1]. To be fair, you can probably achieve something similar with org-mode and rest-client, but the verb-mode integration is very nice.

[1] https://github.com/federicotdn/verb

federicotdn• 5 years ago

Thanks for sharing a link to the project! :) The original submission link reminded me a lot of the general restclient/verb syntax.

Gys• 5 years ago

I use something very similar for a very long time already in vcode: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...

sharat8718• 5 years ago

Hey, yes, this was very much an inspiration when I started off (as can be seen by the same `###` separator lines. Thanks for sharing!

sbarre• 5 years ago

Yeah came here to say the same thing, the VS Code HTTP Client extension is fantastic..

Lets you save your requests alongside your code, you can even define variables and do multi-step requests etc..

paco3346• 5 years ago

This is great. It's an alternative for those who don't want a full IDE or are just getting started with API work. (I hope there's a fully offline version.)

Also reminds me of JetBrains' client: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/phpstorm/http-client-in-produ...

sharat8718• 5 years ago

Hey, thanks for the kind words. Unfortunately, there isn't yet an offline version of this, although I've wanted to do one for the longest of times. But thanks for mentioning, it gives me a pulse of what folks are looking for.

I was actually using the JetBrains version of this idea until a few years ago. The thing that put me off there was that the results weren't visible instantly. I had to click and open another file to see the results. Having a split pane open with the results was something I sorely missed.

anotherhue• 5 years ago

Very nice!

One feature of postman/hoppscotch[0] is that it makes it easy to do oauth2 calls PRIOR to hitting the actual desired endpoint. If you're itching to add new features may I suggest that might be a good one :) ?

Thanks for your work.

0: https://hoppscotch.io/

sharat8718• 5 years ago

Hey, thank you!

Not kidding, I was thinking about how I could make talking to APIs behind an OAuth wall easier in Prestige, just this morning (it's evening for me now). I didn't know Postman and Hoppscotch did that. I'll ideate for some time first and then see how they solved it.

But yes, I do want to add something like this in the future. Thanks for the pointer!

opheliate2• 5 years ago

This is really cool! Would be interested to see if the JavaScript blocks could be used to essentially run integration tests using something like this, so you could assert that the response has certain properties. Being able to define an entire test suite for a service in a format like this would be really useful.

sharat8718• 5 years ago

Hey, thanks so much!

Yes, all of those are indeed things I want to add. I plan is to have a headless runner, like a `prestige-run` command that will take a Prestige sheet file and run the JS blocks, HTTP requests in it and report the result of assertions. It's some distance away, yes, but hopefully, I'll get there :)

JS blocks that take the response of a request to assert values is currently not there. This is something I myself wanted on so many occasions, but haven't got around to doing it. Thanks for chiming in, I'll take your word as a vote of interest on this feature ;)

opheliate2• 5 years ago

Sounds amazing! Best of luck with everything, I'll be watching the repo closely.

cldellow• 5 years ago

That's neat! I like the workbook style for stashing snippets and re-running them, or even for documenting something and sharing it with someone else.

Is there a way to persist my session? In a tool I wrote a while ago I added a really lightweight gist integration - you could connect to github, then hit save in the app and it'd do a client-side save to GitHub and update your URL to match the gist ID.

Then, on returning to the page, if there was a gist ID in the URL, it'd fetch it from github.

EDIT: Ah, just found the browser local storage option.

sharat8718• 5 years ago

Hey, thank you! Integration with GitHub is something I intend to add. Additionally, I plan to add working with files from Dropbox as well.

I haven’t thought about Gist specifically though. That’s a good idea. Let me explore what can be done with it. Thanks again!

tanaypingalkar• 5 years ago

Nice tool it will be more nicer if it have graphql.

sharat8718• 5 years ago

Hey, glad you asked. GraphQL queries are actually just POST requests to a GraphQL endpoint. Although the experience is not something I'm proud of, it's indeed possible to hit GraphQL queries in the following manner:

    POST https://api.github.com/graphql
    Content-Type: application/json
    Authorization: Bearer github-personal-api-token

    ={query: `
    {
      repository(owner: "appsmithorg", name: "appsmith") {
        releases(orderBy: {field: CREATED_AT, direction: DESC}, first: 20) {
          nodes {
            tagName
            name
            url
            descriptionHtml: descriptionHTML
            createdAt
            publishedAt
            isDraft
            isPrerelease
          }
          totalCount
        }
      }
    }
    `}

Know more about this way of running queries at http://localhost:3045/docs/guides/templating/.

RileyJames• 5 years ago

Very nice. I’ve been using insomnia && postman, but I always thought a text based tool would go with the other tools I’m using (sublime and terminal) for developing APIs.

Will check this out. Thanks!

sharat8718• 5 years ago

Hey! Thank you very much. Prestige is open source as well. You can checkout the code at https://github.com/sharat87/prestige. :)

gauthamkolluru• 5 years ago

nice work mate!

sharat8718• 5 years ago

Heyy thanks dude!!

Show HN: Prestige, a text based HTTP client, for working with HTTP APIs

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