Pyrrhic is a simple interactive command-line HTTP client, designed to help test RESTful web APIs.
Pyrrhic is alpha software. It's not feature complete, but it's complete enough to be of some use. Here's the to do list:
- Saving and loading of resource sets
- Colourised output of responses
- HTTP HEAD support
- Ability to define, save and load named data payloads
- Cookie management
- Ability to set arbitrary request headers
- Ability to preview the request before it's sent
- Consider whether it's worth using mechanize or zope.testbrowser as the underlying engine
- Probably lots more
Pyrrhic can be installed with pip or easy_install in the usual way:
pip install pyrrhic
easy_install pyrrhicThis will download and instally pyrrhic and its dependencies, and create a pyr script in your Python's bin directory.
To start Pyrrhic, type pyr at the command prompt:
$ pyr
pyr >>>Type h at the pyr prompt to get a list of commands.
Press Ctrl-D to exit.
The key concept in Pyrrhic is a resource. A resource is essentially a named URL. Pyrrhic will show you all the defined resources with the 's' command. By default, there are none defined:
pyr >>> s
pyr >>>Let's add one:
pyr >>> r http://news.bbc.co.uk/
pyr >>> s
__default__ http://news.bbc.co.uk:80
pyr >>>When you add a resource like that, it becomes the default resource. Adding another resource replaces it:
pyr >>> r http://www.bbc.co.uk/
pyr >>> s
__default__ http://www.bbc.co.uk:80
pyr >>>Pyrrhic can remember other URLs though, if you name them:
pyr >>> r news.bbc.co.uk news
pyr >>> s
__default__ http://www.bbc.co.uk:80
news http://news.bbc.co.uk:80Note that Pyrrhic will assume http as the URL scheme.
Of course, now we have a couple of resources defined, we want to interact with them. Pyrrhic supports the HTTP methods GET, POST, PUT, DELETE and OPTIONS. To invoke a GET on the default resource, simply do:
pyr >>> get
pyr >>> get
200 OK
content-length: 111272
accept-ranges: bytes
expires: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:55:42 GMT
server: Apache
connection: close
pragma: no-cache
cache-control: max-age=0
date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:55:42 GMT
content-type: text/html
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-GB" lang="en-GB">
<head profile="http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/">
<title>BBC - Homepage</title>
... etc ...As you can see, Pyrrhic will show the HTTP status code and message, all headers, and the response body.
You can also similarly work with a named resource:
pyr >>> get news
pyr >>> get news
200 OK
transfer-encoding: chunked
accept-ranges: bytes
expires: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:58:04 GMT
vary: Host
keep-alive: timeout=10, max=678
server: Apache
connection: close
cache-control: max-age=0
date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:58:04 GMT
content-type: text/html
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xml:lang="en-GB" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-GB">
<head>
<title>BBC NEWS | News Front Page</title>The HTTP verbs OPTIONS and DELETE work in a similar way:
pyr >>> del
405 Method Not Allowed
... etc ...
pyr >>> opts news
pyr >>> opts news
200 OK
content-length: 0
expires: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:00:21 GMT
vary: Host
keep-alive: timeout=10, max=733
server: Apache
connection: close
allow: GET,HEAD,POST,OPTIONS,TRACE
cache-control: max-age=0
date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:00:21 GMT
content-type: text/html
pyr >>>In both cases, omitting the resource name works on the default resource.
POST and PUT methods can have data supplied to them. You should supply this in a querystring-like format. As with GET, you can specify a named resource or work with the default resource:
pyr >>> post :key1=value1&key2=value2
200 OK
... etc ...
pyr >>> post :key1=value1 news
200 OK
... etc ...
pyr >>> put :key1=value1
405 Method Not AllowedYou can attach basic authorisation credentials to a resource:
pyr >>> auth username password
pyr >>> auth username password newsAs before, omitting the resource name applies the change to the default resource. All subsequent requests with that resource will use the authorisation headers.
If you want to extend Pyrrhic, please go ahead! The code is on github:
Fork the repository and make your changes, then send me a pull request for review. It would be great if you could write tests for any of your changes.
To run the Pyrrhic test suite, you'll need mock and nose. You may need to install these by hand using pip or easy_install as before. In fact, I'd recommend the following:
94:$ sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv
94:~ dan$ virtualenv pyrrhic
New python executable in pyrrhic/bin/python
Installing setuptools............done.
94:~ dan$ cd pyrrhic/
94:pyrrhic dan$ source bin/activate
(pyrrhic)94:pyrrhic dan$ git clone git://github.com/danfairs/pyrrhic.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/dan/pyrrhic/pyrrhic/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 210, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (163/163), done.
remote: Total 210 (delta 91), reused 110 (delta 42)
Receiving objects: 100% (210/210), 28.10 KiB | 5 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (91/91), done.
(pyrrhic)94:pyrrhic dan$ cd pyrrhic/
(pyrrhic)94:pyrrhic dan$ python setup.py develop
running develop
running egg_info
... etc ...
Installing pyr script to /Users/dan/pyrrhic/bin
Installed /Users/dan/pyrrhic/pyrrhic
Processing dependencies for pyrrhic==0.0dev
Finished processing dependencies for pyrrhic==0.0dev
(pyrrhic)94:pyrrhic dan$ pip install mock nose
Downloading/unpacking nose
Downloading/unpacking mock
Successfully installed mock nose
(pyrrhic)94:pyrrhic dan$ cd pyrrhic
(pyrrhic)94:pyrrhic dan$ nosetests
..................................................................
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 66 tests in 0.023s
OK