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

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 issuewith 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:3000If 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 parameterson 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

Download HTTPie