HTTPie is a command line HTTP client, a user-friendly cURL replacement

by grhmc • 12 years ago

309 76 12 years ago

todd3834• 12 years ago

At first I thought, what is so unfriendly about cURL? Then I saw the screenshot that shows a comparable cURL request behind the HTTPie request and I'm convinced.

jabagonuts• 12 years ago

That was my first thought, too. Then I saw the colorized output and I'm convinced, too.

laurent123456• 12 years ago

Isn't the HTTpie command simpler because it uses defaults for the content type and charset? If Curl did the same (not sure why it should because not everything is JSON/UTF-8), the command would be about as short as the HTTPie one.

barosl• 12 years ago

Determining the type of an argument by looking up the presence of ':', '=', or '==' is brilliant. I liked it.

It can also be used to replace Wget, which not only breaks a multibyte filename sometimes, but also requires the --content-disposition option to handle the Content-Disposition header.

halayli• 12 years ago

I'd just wrap a simple program around curl to improve its argument passing complexity if that's your pain point but I wouldn't go on rewriting an HTTP client.

Curl is a very mature code base by now and that's something to appreciate. It handles all the edge cases well and has dealt with all the mess that you'll discover over time.

paulannesley2• 12 years ago

httpie uses requests[0] under the hood, a well respected python HTT library. See https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie/blob/77955c9837259b1...

amjd• 12 years ago

Httpie doesn't come close to Curl in terms of features. Its selling points are colourised output (using pygments) and (slightly) better json formatting. Here's an unobstructed side by side comparison for the same request: http://i.imgur.com/Bj2wRkq.png

While it won't replace Curl, it can prove quite useful while testing APIs.

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

Why is the order of the headers different between those two examples?

sethammons2• 12 years ago

The user agent is truncated in HTTPie.

jayd16• 12 years ago

Exactly. Seems like a lot of the verbosity that is saved is simply implicitly assuming -i -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8'

_nullandnull_• 12 years ago

Poor choice of name. All I can see is HTTP Internet Explorer.

jfe• 12 years ago

ditto. HTTPy would have been better, methinks.

creeble• 12 years ago

'hc' might have made it successful, at least then it would have one benefit over curl.

lukasm• 12 years ago

Instead of curl I was usually writing https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests

paulannesley2• 12 years ago

That's what httpie uses internally: https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie/blob/77955c9837259b1...

cobralibre• 12 years ago

I seem to spend my every waking moment reporting defects for HTTP APIs. HTTPie's interface is far more intuitive than cURL's, and pretty-printed responses are a kindness not just for me but for the people who have to read the bug reports, too.

mateuszf3• 12 years ago

I'm not sure about httpie but using curl with jq also gives nice formatted and coloured responses.

  curl ... | jq '.'

acdha• 12 years ago

jq is awesome, particularly if you need to filter or otherwise process JSON, but the great part about httpie is that it works with just about everything so you don't have to remember a different filter chain for each type of content.

It uses pygments which means you also get nested formatting for e.g. CSS or JavaScript inside an HTML document.

johns• 12 years ago

You could use our Share URLs which would let the people you share defects with reproduce them for themselves: https://www.runscope.com/docs/sharing

aikah• 12 years ago

Somehow I used to hate curl because I began using it through the PHP Curl extension,which has the most horrible API(no,the other API for HTTP requests in PHP is even worse, it creates adhoc variables,yes variables can appear like that in PHP which leads to "variable name collisison"... ).

But with time,using it in the shell it happened to be quite powerfull for testing apis.

HTTPie coloring is a plus,does it work with XML too?

suprgeek• 12 years ago

This is one of the little known gems I recommend often. the readability difference is just amazing for me. On that note for those of us having to use Windows at the workplace there are a few things that make life easier:

1) Chocolatey (package manager)

2) HTTPie

3) ConEmu (Shell)

4) gow (Unix command line utilities in Windows)

5) WinMerge (win diff)

6) TortiseSVN

7) SourceTree (git)

Makes day to day stuff much smoother....

Fuzzwah• 12 years ago

I've got a couple other utils I'd add to a list like this:

- kitty (ssh client, fork of putty) - visualwget (wget gui) - dsynchronize (dir sync)

wldcordeiro• 12 years ago

Another great SSH client is SmarTTY.

jebblue2• 12 years ago

When I'm on Windows I use Cygwin ssh but for those who are more Windows aware, BitVise Tunnelier.

mateuszf3• 12 years ago

Another one - crossplatform http interception proxy like Fiddler - called mitmproxy. It has a great feature - it can transparently handle https traffic.

mariusmg• 12 years ago

WinMerge is not that good. BeyondCompare is in a league of it's own when it comes with diff apps (it's commercial though).

I can vouch for the rest too....ConEmu especially is very very nice.

rat87• 12 years ago

I've had it installed on a bunch of corporate boxes and never used it and I'm not sure if anyone used it.

Even though it's a bit crash happy on windows and the gtk file picker sucks on windows for my uses meld was the most useful(at least now they have a packaged version for windows - http://sourceforge.net/projects/meld-installer/ - so you don't have to package it yourself). It's simple, good looking, highlights the difference between 2 slightly modified lines, has support for comparing directories, and allows in-place editing.

jebblue2• 12 years ago

I prefer Meld on Linux and yes on the odd day, Windows.

aleem• 12 years ago

I have moved away from windows and miss Fiddler the most. It's ability to record, filter, edit and replay requests made debugging a breeze.

rx4g• 12 years ago

Try the proxy in Burp Suite. The free edition lets you do most of what you can do in Fiddler. More powerful in some ways, rougher around the edges in other ways.

13throwaway• 12 years ago

I like Mitmproxy. http://mitmproxy.org

lstamour• 12 years ago

Charles Web Proxy? Not free, but I've been using it very reliably on all platforms for at least 3 years now. :) A nicely polished bit of software. Free 30 min "trial mode" and no-cost upgrades, if it helps. Otherwise I've also used mitmproxy, or for some things, the Net panel of Chrome Dev Tools.

tim3332• 12 years ago

They seem to have Fiddler for Mac and Linux now (alpha version) http://fiddler.wikidot.com/mono

sharjeel• 12 years ago

I've been looking forward to having WinMerge on Linux for so long. I haven't found a good alternative on Linux which can do quick side-by-side comparison just by pasting from clipboard.

basiliothecat• 12 years ago

If you're on vim side - vimdiff does comparison just right. Though one'd need to tweak it to support comparing stuff from clipboard.

positr0n• 12 years ago

You (and anyone reading this great list of recommendations) should try cmder. It's a customized build of ConEmu with lots of goodies thrown in.

http://bliker.github.io/cmder/

vdaniuk• 12 years ago

Can confirm, cmder is great, it makes console use on Windows bearable.

pcunite• 12 years ago

8) FileSearchEX for searching through source code files

ubercow13• 12 years ago

Git Extensions for git are very nice too

manojlds• 12 years ago

You don't need gow if you are using msysgit right?

jamespo• 12 years ago

I'd add VirtuaWin for virtual desktops

and of course Emacs for Windows

bdevine• 12 years ago

The sessions, the wget-like download mode, the binary detection, the upload capabilities... there is a lot to like here. I will definitely be checking this out. Thanks for posting!

hernan604• 12 years ago

HTTP::Tiny

tomphoolery• 12 years ago

Big fan of this one. HTTPie is a lovely replacement for cURL, especially when you just want to quickly test a JSON API.

aroch2• 12 years ago

D'oh! HTTPie doesn't support SNI

0x006A• 12 years ago

If you use Python 2.x and need to talk to servers that use SNI (Server Name Indication) you need to install some additional dependencies:

$ pip install --upgrade pyopenssl pyasn1 ndg-httpsclient

aroch2• 12 years ago

Ah, I'm not a python man. Thanks for the heads up

_RPM• 12 years ago

While I don't think it will EVER replace curl, it does seem like a fun piece of software to play around with. Great job!

amrit_b• 12 years ago

I use this tool on a regular basis and just love it. Thanks for building HTTPie :)

hcarvalhoalves• 12 years ago

Now if I could pipe the request from Sublime Text and get the results back in a buffer it would be awesome to deal with JSON. Any idea?

nroose• 12 years ago

I will keep using wget.

fibertera• 12 years ago

Tried it, works great! Nice work!!

kernel_panic• 12 years ago

This is amazing! Will definitely be switching away from using curl. I put a the basic examples here to easily play with httpie http://runnable.com/U5wOrMxHLYsVkYbX/basic-httpie-examples-f...

tilltheis2• 12 years ago

Is there any chance get this into Homebrew for an easier installation on Mac?

tim3332• 12 years ago

I just installed it on my mac by doing $ sudo pip install httpie

It was not too tricky

tilltheis2• 12 years ago

Sure, but i dislike installing other tools like pip just for a single tool.

jkbr• 12 years ago

HTTPie has just been added to Homebrew:

    $ brew install httpie

SimeVidas• 12 years ago

Is there a curl replacement written in Node (for us Windows users who don't have a proper curl out of the box)?

krick• 12 years ago

Tried it just now and I see non-ascii characters messed up, while curl shows that page fine. Probably there's some case-specific reason for that, but still…

HTTPie is a command line HTTP client, a user-friendly cURL replacement

Related Stories