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HTTPie: a CLI, cURL-like tool for humans

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 compared to cURL

HTTPie is written in Python, and under the hood it uses the excellent Requests and Pygments libraries.

Latest version released on PyPi Build status of the master branch on Mac/Linux Build status of the master branch on Windows Test coverage

Main Features

  • 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

Installation

On Mac OS X, HTTPie can be installed via Homebrew:

$ brew install httpie

Most Linux distributions provide a package that can be installed using the system package manager, e.g.:

# Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu:
$ apt-get install httpie

# RPM-based distributions:
$ yum install httpie

A universal installation method (that works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, …, and provides the latest version) is to use pip:

# Make sure we have an up-to-date version of pip and setuptools:
$ pip install --upgrade pip setuptools

$ pip install --upgrade httpie

(If pip installation fails for some reason, you can try easy_install httpie as a fallback.)

Development version

The latest development version can be installed directly from GitHub:

# Mac OS X via Homebrew
$ brew install httpie --HEAD

# Universal
$ pip install --upgrade https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie/tarball/master

Usage

Hello World:

$ http httpie.org

Synopsis:

$ http [flags] [METHOD] URL [ITEM [ITEM]]

See also http --help.

Examples

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/jkbrzt/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

Download a file wget style:

$ http --download example.org/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

Set a custom Host header to work around missing DNS records:

$ http localhost:8000 Host:example.com

What follows is a detailed documentation. It covers the command syntax, advanced usage, and also features additional examples.

HTTP Method

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).

Request URL

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.

$ http :/foo
GET /foo HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
$ http :3000/bar
GET /bar HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:3000
$ http :
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:

$ http GET www.google.com search==HTTPie tbm==isch
GET /?search=HTTPie&tbm=isch HTTP/1.1

Request Items

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

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:

$ http PUT example.org name=John email=john@example.org
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 :=@:

$ http PUT api.example.com/person/1 \
    name=John \
    age:=29 married:=false hobbies:='["http", "pies"]' \  # Raw JSON
    description=@about-john.txt \   # Embed text file
    bookmarks:=@bookmarks.json      # Embed JSON file
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):

$ http POST api.example.com/person/1 < person.json

Forms

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.

Regular Forms

$ http --form POST api.example.org/person/1 name='John Smith' \
    email=john@example.org cv=@~/Documents/cv.txt
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+...

File Upload Forms

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>

Note that @ is used to simulate a file upload form field, whereas =@ just embeds the file content as a regular text field value.

HTTP Headers

To set custom headers you can use the Header:Value notation:

$ http example.org  User-Agent:Bacon/1.0  'Cookie:valued-visitor=yes;foo=bar'  \
    X-Foo:Bar  Referer:http://httpie.org/
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.

Authentication

The currently supported authentication schemes are Basic and Digest (see auth plugins for more). 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 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.

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

Authorization information from your ~/.netrc file is honored as well:

$ cat ~/.netrc
machine httpbin.org
login httpie
password test

$ http httpbin.org/basic-auth/httpie/test
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
[...]

Auth Plugins

Proxies

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):

$ http --proxy=http:http://10.10.1.10:3128 --proxy=https:https://10.10.1.10:1080 example.org

With Basic authentication:

$ http --proxy=http:http://user:pass@10.10.1.10:3128 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=http://10.10.1.10:3128
export HTTPS_PROXY=https://10.10.1.10:1080
export NO_PROXY=localhost,example.com

HTTPS

Server SSL certificate verification

To skip the host's SSL certificate verification, you can pass --verify=no (default is yes):

$ http --verify=no https://example.org

You can also use --verify=<CA_BUNDLE_PATH> to set a custom CA bundle path:

$ http --verify=/ssl/custom_ca_bundle https://example.org

The path can also be configured via the environment variable REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE (picked up by the underlying python-requests library):

$ REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE=/ssl/custom_ca_bundle http https://example.org

Client side SSL certificate

To use a client side certificate for the SSL communication, you can pass the path of the cert file with --cert:

$ http --cert=client.pem https://example.org

If the private key is not contained in the cert file you may pass the path of the key file with --cert-key:

$ http --cert=client.crt --cert-key=client.key https://example.org

SNI (Server Name Indication)

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:

$ pip install --upgrade pyopenssl pyasn1 ndg-httpsclient

You can use the following command to test SNI support:

$ http https://sni.velox.ch

Output Options

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:

$ http --print=Hh PUT httpbin.org/put hello=world

Conditional Body Download

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

Redirected Input

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 '401 Unauthorized' /var/log/httpd/error_log | 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/jkbrzt/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:

$ echo 'data' | http POST example.org more=data   # This is invalid

To prevent HTTPie from reading stdin data you can use the --ignore-stdin option.

Body Data From a Filename

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

Terminal Output

HTTPie does several things by default in order to make its terminal output easy to read.

Colors and Formatting

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:

--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

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 |
+-----------------------------------------+

Redirected Output

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 --print=hb "$@" | less -R;
}

Download Mode

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 --download https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie/tarball/master
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:

$ http -d https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie/tarball/master |  tar zxf -

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:

$ http -dco file.zip example.org/file

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.

Streamed Responses

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:

  1. The output is flushed in much smaller chunks without any buffering, which makes HTTPie behave kind of like tail -f for URLs.
  2. 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

Sessions

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.

Named Sessions

Create a new session named user1 for example.org:

$ 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.

Named sessions' data is stored in JSON files in the directory ~/.httpie/sessions/<host>/<name>.json (%APPDATA%\httpie\sessions\<host>\<name>.json on Windows).

Anonymous Sessions

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:

$ http --session=/tmp/session.json example.org
$ http --session=/tmp/session.json admin.example.org
$ http --session=~/.httpie/sessions/another.example.org/test.json example.org
$ http --session-read-only=/tmp/session.json example.org

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.

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 Array (by default empty) of options that should be applied to every request.

For instance, you can use this option to change the default style and output options: "default_options": ["--style=fruity", "--body"]

Another useful default option is "--session=default" to make HTTPie always use sessions.

Default options from config file can be unset for a particular invocation via --no-OPTION arguments passed on the command line (e.g., --no-style or --no-session).

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.

Scripting

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

Interface Design

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 change log.

Authors

Jakub Roztocil (@jkbrzt) created HTTPie and these fine people have contributed.

Logo

Please see claudiatd/httpie-artwork

Contribute

Please see CONTRIBUTING.

Change Log

Please see CHANGELOG.

Licence

Please see LICENSE.

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CLI HTTP client; user-friendly cURL replacement featuring intuitive UI, JSON support, syntax highlighting, wget-like downloads, extensions, etc.

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