Setting Scheme and Host in headers?

[huangjj27]

I'm using hurl as RESTful API specification, so I prefer a format that only the API path after the HTTP action, while the scheme and the host are defined in a Scheme and a Host header:

# token.hurl
POST /tokens
Scheme: {{SCHEME}}
Host: {{HOST}}

But when I run this example with the command hurl tokens.hurl --variables-file=test.env, I get this error:

> hurl tokens.hurl --variables-file=test.env
error: Http Connection
  --> tokens.hurl:8:6
   |
 8 | POST /tokens
   |      ^^^^^^^ (3) URL using bad/illegal format or missing URL
   |

And I expect the example should work, but it seems this doesn't work now. Therefore, I'm here to request new feature support. Any advice?

[jcamiel]

Hi,

Using url without scheme (http/https) and host looks really like HTTP so it' interesting. But how would you tell if the protocol is HTTP or HTTPS? Choosing one by default seems arbitrary...

For the moment, you can, of course, templatize the url:

POST https://{{host}}/tokens

[huangjj27]

But how would you tell if the protocol is HTTP or HTTPS?

Oh, Indeed that variable {{host}} means {{scheme_and_host}}, so that I could use HTTP for the test environment and HTTPS for production. Besides, it's set as the "Host" header. I check out the section-5.4 of RFC 7230, and find out that the Host header doesn't contain a scheme. A temporary solution is to place the {{scheme_and_host}} variable into the URL rather than the Host header, like:

# token.hurl
POST {{scheme_and_host}}/tokens

where {{scheme_and_host}} could be a http://my.domain.test or a https://my.domain.release

[huangjj27]

I find some interesting request from firefox, that some request is using a Scheme header to identify the request scheme, It this part of the HTTP protocol standard?

[huangjj27]

The original post is edited.

[jcamiel]

I'm not at all a HTTP spec expert but I don't see the Scheme header often. It's not referenced in RFC2616 nor in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields. As it is not "well known", I'm a bit reluctant to add this kind of syntax:

POST /path
Host: example.com
Scheme: https

[huangjj27]

It's not referenced in RFC2616 nor in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields.

ok, since Scheme is not a standard header, we should not parse it as a header.

[louy2]

I really like this idea of making the request line more like actual HTTP request.

how would you tell if the protocol is HTTP or HTTPS?

When a URL has no protocol, curl follows the option --proto-default, or in its absence guesses the protocol based on the hostname. You can also specify --ssl-reqd to force TLS upgrade.