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]
[--print OUTPUT_OPTIONS | --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 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.
--print OUTPUT_OPTIONS, -p OUTPUT_OPTIONS
String specifying what should the output contain. "H"
stands for request headers and "B" for request body.
"h" stands for response headers and "b" for response
body. Defaults to "hb" which means that the whole
response (headers and body) is printed.
--headers, -t Print only the response headers. It's a shortcut for
--print=h.
--body, -b Print only the response body. It's a shortcut for
--print=b.
--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).
- New in development version
- 0.1.6 (2012-03-04)