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
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
$ http [flags] [METHOD] URL [ITEM [ITEM]]
http --help
.Examples
Custom HTTP method, HTTP headers and JSON data:
$ http PUT example.org X-API-Token:123 name=John
$ http -f POST example.org hello=World
$ http -v example.org
$ http -a USERNAME POST https://api.github.com/repos/jkbrzt/httpie/issues/83/comments body='HTTPie is awesome!'
$ http example.org < file.json
$ http example.org/file > file
wget
style:$ http --download example.org/file
$ http --session=logged-in -a username:password httpbin.org/get API-Key:123$ http --session=logged-in httpbin.org/headers
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
Request-Line
that is sent:DELETE /todos/7 HTTP/1.1
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
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