HTTPie is a CLI HTTP utility built out of frustration with existing tools. The goal is to make CLI interaction with HTTP-based services as human-friendly as possible.
HTTPie does so by providing an http
command that allows for issuing arbitrary HTTP requests using a simple and natural syntax and displaying colorized responses:
Under the hood, HTTPie uses the excellent Requests and Pygments Python libraries.
The latest stable version of HTTPie can always be installed (or updated to) via pip:
pip install -U httpie
Or, you can install the development version directly from GitHub:
pip install -U https://github.com/jkbr/httpie/tarball/master
Hello world:
http GET httpie.org
Synopsis:
http [flags] METHOD URL [items]
There are three types of key-value pair items available:
- Headers
Arbitrary HTTP headers. The
:
character is used to separate a header's name from its value, e.g.,X-API-Token:123
.- Simple data items
Data items are included in the request body. Depending on the
Content-Type
, they are automatically serialized as a JSONObject
(default) orapplication/x-www-form-urlencoded
(the-f
flag). Data items use=
as the separator, e.g.,hello=world
.- Raw JSON items
This item type is needed when
Content-Type
is JSON and a field's value is aBoolean
,Number
, nestedObject
or anArray
, because simple data items are always serialized asString
. E.g.pies:=[1,2,3]
.
http PATCH api.example.com/person/1 X-API-Token:123 name=John email=john@example.org age:=29
The following request is issued:
PATCH /person/1 HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.1
X-API-Token: 123
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
{"name": "John", "email": "john@example.org", "age": 29}
It can easily be changed to a 'form' request using the -f
(or --form
) flag, which produces:
PATCH /person/1 HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.1
X-API-Token: 123
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8
age=29&name=John&email=john%40example.org
A whole request body can be passed in via stdin
instead:
echo '{"name": "John"}' | http PATCH example.com/person/1 X-API-Token:123
# Or:
http POST example.com/person/1 X-API-Token:123 < person.json
Most of the flags mirror the arguments understood by requests.request
. See http -h
for more details:
usage: http [-h] [--version] [--json | --form] [--traceback]
[--pretty | --ugly] [--headers | --body] [--style STYLE]
[--auth AUTH] [--verify VERIFY] [--proxy PROXY]
[--allow-redirects] [--file PATH] [--timeout TIMEOUT]
METHOD URL [items [items ...]]
HTTPie - cURL for humans.
positional arguments:
METHOD HTTP method to be used for the request (GET, POST,
PUT, DELETE, PATCH, ...).
URL Protocol defaults to http:// if the URL does not
include it.
items HTTP header (key:value), data field (key=value) or raw
JSON field (field:=value).
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--version show program's version number and exit
--json, -j Serialize data items as a JSON object and set Content-
Type to application/json, if not specified.
--form, -f Serialize data items as form values and set Content-
Type to application/x-www-form-urlencoded, if not
specified.
--traceback Print exception traceback should one occur.
--pretty, -p If stdout is a terminal, the response is prettified by
default (colorized and indented if it is JSON). This
flag ensures prettifying even when stdout is
redirected.
--ugly, -u Do not prettify the response.
--headers, -t Print only the response headers.
--body, -b Print only the response body.
--style STYLE, -s STYLE
Output coloring style, one of autumn, borland, bw,
colorful, default, emacs, friendly, fruity, manni,
monokai, murphy, native, pastie, perldoc, solarized,
tango, trac, vim, vs. Defaults to solarized.
--auth AUTH, -a AUTH username:password
--verify VERIFY Set to "yes" to check the host's SSL certificate. You
can also pass the path to a CA_BUNDLE file for private
certs. You can also set the REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE
environment variable.
--proxy PROXY String mapping protocol to the URL of the proxy (e.g.
http:foo.bar:3128).
--allow-redirects Set this flag if full redirects are allowed (e.g. re-
POST-ing of data at new ``Location``)
--file PATH File to multipart upload
--timeout TIMEOUT Float describes the timeout of the request (Use
socket.setdefaulttimeout() as fallback).
- 0.1.6 (2012-03-04)