HTTP Shell

HTTP Shell provides developers with a modern alternative to HTTP clients for interacting with APIs. Let's see it as something between a low-level command line interface, like curl or httpie, and a more user friendly GUI client, like Postman. The idea is that tools like curl are very powerful but a bit cumbersome, it is often hard for us to remember the exact syntax for each HTTP verb. HTTP Shell instead is still a command line interface, but with a much straightforward user experience.

HTTP Shell is a tool built on top of IBM's open source Kui framework.

Kui combines the power of familiar CLIs with visualizations in high-impact areas. Kui enables you to manipulate complex JSON and YAML data models, integrate disparate tooling, and provides quick access to aggregate views of operational data.

Installation

We offer prebuilt images for Windows, MacOS and Linux.

Get HTTP Shell binary from the releases download page

Usage

Find more HTTP Shell's usage information, commands and examples on RESTHeart documentation.

Build from source

First step:

npm ci

Next, choose your journey from the following variants:

Variant 1: I want to develop an Electron client

Use these commands while developing. The first starts up the Webpack watcher. Each time you execute the second, an Electron window will open.

npm run start
npm run open

And use one of these commands to build production clients, after which your clients will be placed in ./dist/electron.

npm run build:electron:all
npm run build:electron:mac
npm run build:electron:linux
npm run build:electron:windows

Variant 2: I want to develop a browser-based client

Use this command while developing:

npm run watch:source
npm run watch:webpack

Then visit http://localhost:9080. To build a production set of Webpack bundles, use this command:

npx kui-build-webpack

Get help

As soon as the shell starts, get commands usage help with:

> help http-shell

Acknowledgments

Project derived from AnimalApp Kui skeleton project

Contribute

GitHub

Bugs