HTTPie (pronounced aitch-tee-tee-pie) is a command line HTTP client.Its goal is to make CLI interaction with web services as human-friendlyas possible. It provides a simple http command that allows for sendingarbitrary HTTP requests using a simple and natural syntax, and displayscolorized output. HTTPie can be used for testing, debugging, andgenerally interacting with HTTP servers.

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
• Linux, macOS and Windows support
• Plugins
• Documentation
• Test coverage

Installation

macOS

On macOS, HTTPie can be installed via Homebrew(recommended):

$ brew install httpie

A MacPorts port is also available:

$ port install httpie

Linux

Most Linux distributions provide a package that can be installed using thesystem package manager, for example:

# Debian, Ubuntu, etc.
$ apt-get install httpie

# Fedora
$ dnf install httpie

# CentOS, RHEL, ...
$ yum install httpie

# Arch Linux
$ pacman -S httpie

Windows, etc.

A universal installation method (that works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, …,and always 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 tryeasy_install httpie as a fallback.)

Python version

Python version 3.6 or greater is required.

Unstable version

You can also install the latest unreleased development version directly fromthe master branch on GitHub. It is a work-in-progress of a future stablerelease so the experience might be not as smooth.

On macOS you can install it with Homebrew:

$ brew install httpie --HEAD

Otherwise with pip:

$ pip install --upgrade https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie/archive/master.tar.gz

Verify that now we have thecurrent development version identifierwith the -dev suffix, for example:

$ http --version
1.0.0-dev

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 anissuewith authentication:

$ http -a USERNAME POST https://api.github.com/repos/jakubroztocil/httpie/issues/83/comments body='HTTPie is awesome! :heart:'

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 persistentbetween 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

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 toeither 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.

Querystring parameters

If you find yourself manually constructing URLs with querystring parameterson the terminal, you may appreciate the param==value syntax for appendingURL parameters.

With that, you don't have to worry about escaping the &separators for your shell. Additionally, any special characters in theparameter name or value get automatically URL-escaped(as opposed to parameters specified in the full URL, which HTTPie doesn’tmodify).

$ http https://api.github.com/search/repositories q==httpie per_page==1

GET /search/repositories?q=httpie&per_page=1 HTTP/1.1

URL shortcuts for localhost

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

Other default schemes

When HTTPie is invoked as https then the default scheme is https://($ https example.org will make a request to https://example.org).

You can also use the —default-scheme <URL_SCHEME> option to createshortcuts for other protocols than HTTP (possibly supported via plugins).Example for the httpie-unixsocket plugin:

# Before
$ http http+unix://%2Fvar%2Frun%2Fdocker.sock/info

# Create an alias
$ alias http-unix='http --default-scheme="http+unix"'

# Now the scheme can be omitted
$ http-unix %2Fvar%2Frun%2Fdocker.sock/info

Request items

There are a few different request item types that provide aconvenient mechanism for specifying HTTP headers, simple JSON andform data, files, and URL parameters.

They are key/value pairs specified after the URL. All have incommon that they become part of the actual request that is sent and thattheir type is distinguished only by the separator used::, =, :=, ==, @, [email protected], and :[email protected]. The ones with an@ expect a file path as value.

Note that data fields aren't the only way to specify request data:Redirected input is a mechanism for passing arbitrary request data.

Escaping rules

You can use \ to escape characters that shouldn't be used as separators(or parts thereof). For instance, foo\==bar will become a data key/valuepair (foo= and bar) instead of a URL parameter.

Often it is necessary to quote the values, e.g. foo='bar baz'.

If any of the field names or headers starts with a minus(e.g., -fieldname), you need to place all such items after the specialtoken — to prevent confusion with —arguments:

$ http httpbin.org/post  --  -name-starting-with-dash=foo -Unusual-Header:bar

POST /post HTTP/1.1
-Unusual-Header: bar
Content-Type: application/json
 
{
    "-name-starting-with-dash": "foo"
}

JSON

JSON is the lingua franca of modern web services and it is also theimplicit content type HTTPie uses by default.

Simple example:

$ http PUT example.org name=John email=[email protected]

PUT / HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json, */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/json
Host: example.org
 
{
    "name": "John",
    "email": "[email protected]"
}

Default behaviour

If your command includes some data request items, they are serialized as a JSONobject by default. HTTPie also automatically sets the following headers,both of which can be overwritten:

Explicit JSON

You can use —json, -j to explicitly set Acceptto application/json regardless of whether you are sending data(it's a shortcut for setting the header via the usual header notation:http url Accept:'application/json, /'). Additionally,HTTPie will try to detect JSON responses even when theContent-Type is incorrectly text/plain or unknown.

Non-string JSON fields

Non-string fields use the := separator, which allows you to embed raw JSONinto the resulting object. Text and raw JSON files can also be embedded intofields using [email protected] and :[email protected]:

$ http PUT api.example.com/person/1 \
    name=John \
    age:=29 married:=false hobbies:='["http", "pies"]' \  # Raw JSON
    description=@about-john.txt \   # Embed text file
    bookmarks:=@bookmarks.json      # Embed JSON file

PUT /person/1 HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json, */*
Content-Type: application/json
Host: api.example.com
 
{
    "age": 29,
    "hobbies": [
        "http",
        "pies"
    ],
    "description": "John is a nice guy who likes pies.",
    "married": false,
    "name": "John",
    "bookmarks": {
        "HTTPie": "https://httpie.org",
    }
}

Please note that with this syntax the command gets unwieldy when sendingcomplex data. In that case it's always better to use redirected input:

$ http POST api.example.com/person/1 < person.json

Forms

Submitting forms is very similar to sending JSON requests. Often the onlydifference is in adding the —form, -f option, which ensures thatdata fields are serialized as, and Content-Type is set to,application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8. It is possible to makeform data the implicit content type instead of JSONvia the config file.

Regular forms

$ http --form POST api.example.org/person/1 name='John Smith'

POST /person/1 HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8
 
name=John+Smith

File upload forms

If one or more file fields is present, the serialization and content type ismultipart/form-data:

$ http -f POST example.com/jobs name='John Smith' [email protected]~/Documents/cv.pdf

The request above is the same as if the following HTML form weresubmitted:

<form enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post" action="http://example.com/jobs">
    <input type="text" name="name" />
    <input type="file" name="cv" />
</form>

Note that @ is used to simulate a file upload form field, whereas[email protected] just embeds the file content as a regular text field value.

HTTP headers

To set custom headers you can use the Header:Value notation:

$ http example.org  User-Agent:Bacon/1.0  'Cookie:valued-visitor=yes;foo=bar'  \
    X-Foo:Bar  Referer:https://httpie.org/

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Cookie: valued-visitor=yes;foo=bar
Host: example.org
Referer: https://httpie.org/
User-Agent: Bacon/1.0
X-Foo: Bar

Default request headers

There are a couple of default headers that HTTPie sets:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: HTTPie/<version>
Host: <taken-from-URL>

Any of these except Host can be overwritten and some of them unset.

Empty headers and header un-setting

To unset a previously specified header(such a one of the default headers), use Header::

$ http httpbin.org/headers Accept: User-Agent:

To send a header with an empty value, use Header;:

$ http httpbin.org/headers 'Header;'

Limiting response headers

The —max-headers=n options allows you to control the number of headersHTTPie reads before giving up (the default 0, i.e., there’s no limit).

$ http --max-headers=100 httpbin.org/get

Cookies

HTTP clients send cookies to the server as regular HTTP headers. That means,HTTPie does not offer any special syntax for specifying cookies — the usualHeader:Value notation is used:

Send a single cookie:

$ http example.org Cookie:sessionid=foo

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: sessionid=foo
Host: example.org
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.9.9

Send multiple cookies(note the header is quoted to prevent the shell from interpreting the ;):

$ http example.org 'Cookie:sessionid=foo;another-cookie=bar'

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: sessionid=foo;another-cookie=bar
Host: example.org
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.9.9

If you often deal with cookies in your requests, then chances are you'd appreciatethe sessions feature.

Authentication

The currently supported authentication schemes are Basic and Digest(see auth plugins for more). There are two flags that control authentication:

Basic auth

$ http -a username:password example.org

Digest auth

$ http -A digest -a username:password example.org

Password prompt

$ http -a username example.org

.netrc

Authentication information from your ~/.netrcfile is by default honored as well.

For example:

$ cat ~/.netrc
machine httpbin.org
login httpie
password test

$ http httpbin.org/basic-auth/httpie/test
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
[...]

This can be disabled with the —ignore-netrc option:

$ http --ignore-netrc httpbin.org/basic-auth/httpie/test
HTTP/1.1 401 UNAUTHORIZED
[...]

Auth plugins

Additional authentication mechanism can be installed as plugins.They can be found on the Python Package Index.Here's a few picks:

• httpie-api-auth: ApiAuth
• httpie-aws-auth: AWS / Amazon S3
• httpie-edgegrid: EdgeGrid
• httpie-hmac-auth: HMAC
• httpie-jwt-auth: JWTAuth (JSON Web Tokens)
• httpie-negotiate: SPNEGO (GSS Negotiate)
• httpie-ntlm: NTLM (NT LAN Manager)
• httpie-oauth: OAuth
• requests-hawk: Hawk

HTTP redirects

By default, HTTP redirects are not followed and only the firstresponse is shown:

$ http httpbin.org/redirect/3

Follow Location

To instruct HTTPie to follow the Location header of 30x responsesand show the final response instead, use the —follow, -F option:

$ http --follow httpbin.org/redirect/3

Showing intermediary redirect responses

If you additionally wish to see the intermediary requests/responses,then use the —all option as well:

$ http --follow --all httpbin.org/redirect/3

Limiting maximum redirects followed

To change the default limit of maximum 30 redirects, use the—max-redirects=<limit> option:

$ http --follow --all --max-redirects=5 httpbin.org/redirect/3

Proxies

You can specify proxies to be used through the —proxy argument for eachprotocol (which is included in the value in case of redirects across protocols):

$ http --proxy=http:http://10.10.1.10:3128 --proxy=https:https://10.10.1.10:1080 example.org

With Basic authentication:

$ http --proxy=http:http://user:[email protected]:3128 example.org

Environment variables

You can also configure proxies by environment variables ALL_PROXY,HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY, and the underlying Requests library willpick them up as well. If you want to disable proxies configured throughthe environment variables for certain hosts, you can specify them in NO_PROXY.

In your ~/.bash_profile:

export HTTP_PROXY=http://10.10.1.10:3128
export HTTPS_PROXY=https://10.10.1.10:1080
export NO_PROXY=localhost,example.com

SOCKS

Homebrew-installed HTTPie comes with SOCKS proxy support out of the box.To enable SOCKS proxy support for non-Homebrew installations, you'llmight need to install requests[socks] manually using pip:

$ pip install -U requests[socks]

Usage is the same as for other types of proxies:

$ http --proxy=http:socks5://user:[email protected]:port --proxy=https:socks5://user:[email protected]:port example.org

HTTPS

Server SSL certificate verification

To skip the host's SSL certificate verification, you can pass —verify=no(default is yes):

$ http --verify=no https://example.org

Custom CA bundle

You can also use —verify=<CA_BUNDLE_PATH> to set a custom CA bundle path:

$ http --verify=/ssl/custom_ca_bundle https://example.org

Client side SSL certificate

To use a client side certificate for the SSL communication, you can passthe path of the cert file with —cert:

$ http --cert=client.pem https://example.org

If the private key is not contained in the cert file you may pass thepath of the key file with —cert-key:

$ http --cert=client.crt --cert-key=client.key https://example.org

SSL version

Use the —ssl=<PROTOCOL> to specify the desired protocol version to use.This will default to SSL v2.3 which will negotiate the highest protocol that boththe server and your installation of OpenSSL support. The available protocolsare ssl2.3, ssl3, tls1, tls1.1, tls1.2, tls1.3. (The actuallyavailable set of protocols may vary depending on your OpenSSL installation.)

# Specify the vulnerable SSL v3 protocol to talk to an outdated server:
$ http --ssl=ssl3 https://vulnerable.example.org

Output options

By default, HTTPie only outputs the final response and the whole responsemessage is printed (headers as well as the body). You can control what shouldbe printed via several options:

—verbose can often be useful for debugging the request and generatingdocumentation examples:

$ http --verbose PUT httpbin.org/put hello=world
PUT /put HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json, */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/json
Host: httpbin.org
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.2.7dev
 
{
    "hello": "world"
}
 
 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 477
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2012 00:25:23 GMT
Server: gunicorn/0.13.4
 
{
    […]
}

What parts of the HTTP exchange should be printed

All the other output options are under the hood just shortcuts forthe more powerful —print, -p. It accepts a string of characters eachof which represents a specific part of the HTTP exchange:

Print request and response headers:

$ http --print=Hh PUT httpbin.org/put hello=world

Viewing intermediary requests/responses

To see all the HTTP communication, i.e. the final request/response aswell as any possible intermediary requests/responses, use the —alloption. The intermediary HTTP communication include followed redirects(with —follow), the first unauthorized request when HTTP digestauthentication is used (—auth=digest), etc.

# Include all responses that lead to the final one:
$ http --all --follow httpbin.org/redirect/3

The intermediary requests/response are by default formatted according to—print, -p (and its shortcuts described above). If you'd like to changethat, use the —history-print, -P option. It takes the samearguments as —print, -p but applies to the intermediary requests only.

# Print the intermediary requests/responses differently than the final one:
$ http -A digest -a foo:bar --all -p Hh -P H httpbin.org/digest-auth/auth/foo/bar

Conditional body download

As an optimization, the response body is downloaded from the serveronly if it's part of the output. This is similar to performing a HEADrequest, except that it applies to any HTTP method you use.

Let's say that there is an API that returns the whole resource when it isupdated, but you are only interested in the response headers to see thestatus code after an update:

$ http --headers PATCH example.org/Really-Huge-Resource name='New Name'

Since we are only printing the HTTP headers here, the connection to the serveris closed as soon as all the response headers have been received.Therefore, bandwidth and time isn't wasted downloading the bodywhich you don't care about. The response headers are downloaded always,even if they are not part of the output

Redirected Input

The universal method for passing request data is through redirected stdin(standard input)—piping. Such data is buffered and then with no furtherprocessing used as the request body. There are multiple useful ways to usepiping:

Redirect from a file:

$ http PUT example.com/person/1 X-API-Token:123 < person.json

Or the output of another program:

$ grep '401 Unauthorized' /var/log/httpd/error_log | http POST example.org/intruders

You can use echo for simple data:

$ echo '{"name": "John"}' | http PATCH example.com/person/1 X-API-Token:123

You can also use a Bash here string:

$ http example.com/ <<<'{"name": "John"}'

You can even pipe web services together using HTTPie:

$ http GET https://api.github.com/repos/jakubroztocil/httpie | http POST httpbin.org/post

You can use cat to enter multiline data on the terminal:

$ cat | http POST example.com
<paste>
^D

$ cat | http POST example.com/todos Content-Type:text/plain
- buy milk
- call parents
^D

On OS X, you can send the contents of the clipboard with pbpaste:

$ pbpaste | http PUT example.com

Passing data through stdin cannot be combined with data fields specifiedon the command line:

$ echo 'data' | http POST example.org more=data   # This is invalid

To prevent HTTPie from reading stdin data you can use the—ignore-stdin option.

Request data from a filename

An alternative to redirected stdin is specifying a filename (as@/path/to/file) whose content is used as if it came from stdin.

It has the advantage that the Content-Typeheader is automatically set to the appropriate value based on thefilename extension. For example, the following request sends theverbatim contents of that XML file with Content-Type: application/xml:

$ http PUT httpbin.org/put @/data/file.xml

Terminal output

HTTPie does several things by default in order to make its terminal outputeasy to read.

Colors and formatting

Syntax highlighting is applied to HTTP headers and bodies (where it makessense). You can choose your preferred color scheme via the —style optionif you don't like the default one (see $ http —help for the possiblevalues).

Also, the following formatting is applied:

• HTTP headers are sorted by name.
• JSON data is indented, sorted by keys, and unicode escapes are convertedto the characters they represent.

One of these options can be used to control output processing:

Binary data

Binary data is suppressed for terminal output, which makes it safe to performrequests to URLs that send back binary data. Binary data is suppressed also inredirected, but prettified output. The connection is closed as soon as we knowthat the response body is binary,

$ http example.org/Movie.mov

You will nearly instantly see something like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: video/quicktime
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
 
+-----------------------------------------+
| NOTE: binary data not shown in terminal |
+-----------------------------------------+

Redirected output

HTTPie uses a different set of defaults for redirected output than forterminal output. The differences being:

• Formatting and colors aren't applied (unless —pretty is specified).
• Only the response body is printed (unless one of the output options is set).
• Also, binary data isn't suppressed.

The reason is to make piping HTTPie's output to another programs anddownloading files work with no extra flags. Most of the time, only the rawresponse body is of an interest when the output is redirected.

Download a file:

$ http example.org/Movie.mov > Movie.mov

Download an image of Octocat, resize it using ImageMagick, upload it elsewhere:

$ http octodex.github.com/images/original.jpg | convert - -resize 25% -  | http example.org/Octocats

Force colorizing and formatting, and show both the request and the response inless pager:

$ http --pretty=all --verbose example.org | less -R

The -R flag tells less to interpret color escape sequences includedHTTPie`s output.

You can create a shortcut for invoking HTTPie with colorized and paged outputby adding the following to your ~/.bash_profile:

function httpless {
    # `httpless example.org'
    http --pretty=all --print=hb "[email protected]" | less -R;
}

Download mode

HTTPie features a download mode in which it acts similarly to wget.

When enabled using the —download, -d flag, response headers are printed tothe terminal (stderr), and a progress bar is shown while the response bodyis being saved to a file.

$ http --download https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie/archive/master.tar.gz

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=httpie-master.tar.gz
Content-Length: 257336
Content-Type: application/x-gzip
 
Downloading 251.30 kB to "httpie-master.tar.gz"
Done. 251.30 kB in 2.73862s (91.76 kB/s)

Downloaded filename

There are three mutually exclusive ways through which HTTPie determinesthe output filename (with decreasing priority):

$ http -d https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie/archive/master.tar.gz |  tar zxf -

$ http -dco file.zip example.org/file

Examples use cases

Prettified streamed response:

$ http --stream -f -a YOUR-TWITTER-NAME https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/filter.json track='Justin Bieber'

Streamed output by small chunks alá tail -f:

# Send each new tweet (JSON object) mentioning "Apple" to another
# server as soon as it arrives from the Twitter streaming API:
$ http --stream -f -a YOUR-TWITTER-NAME https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/filter.json track=Apple \
| while read tweet; do echo "$tweet" | http POST example.org/tweets ; done

Sessions

By default, every request HTTPie makes is completely independent of anyprevious ones to the same host.

However, HTTPie also supports persistentsessions via the —session=SESSION_NAME_OR_PATH option. In a session,custom HTTP headers (except for the ones starting with Content- or If-),authentication, and cookies(manually specified or sent by the server) persist between requeststo the same host.

# Create a new session
$ http --session=/tmp/session.json example.org API-Token:123
 
# Re-use an existing session — API-Token will be set:
$ http --session=/tmp/session.json example.org

All session data, including credentials, cookie data,and custom headers are stored in plain text.That means session files can also be created and edited manually in a texteditor—they are regular JSON. It also means that they can be read by anyonewho has access to the session file.

Named sessions

You can create one or more named session per host. For example, this is howyou can create a new session named user1 for example.org:

$ http --session=user1 -a user1:password example.org X-Foo:Bar

From now on, you can refer to the session by its name. When you choose touse the session again, any previously specified authentication or HTTP headerswill automatically be set:

$ http --session=user1 example.org

To create or reuse a different session, simple specify a different name:

$ http --session=user2 -a user2:password example.org X-Bar:Foo

Named sessions’s data is stored in JSON files in the the sessionssubdirectory of the config directory:~/.httpie/sessions/<host>/<name>.json(%APPDATA%\httpie\sessions\<host>\<name>.json on Windows).

Anonymous sessions

Instead of a name, you can also directly specify a path to a session file. Thisallows for sessions to be re-used across multiple hosts:

$ http --session=/tmp/session.json example.org
$ http --session=/tmp/session.json admin.example.org
$ http --session=~/.httpie/sessions/another.example.org/test.json example.org
$ http --session-read-only=/tmp/session.json example.org

Readonly session

To use an existing session file without updating it from the request/responseexchange once it is created, specify the session name via—session-read-only=SESSION_NAME_OR_PATH instead.

Config

HTTPie uses a simple config.json file. The file doesn’t exist by defaultbut you can create it manually.

Config file directory

The default location of the configuration file is ~/.httpie/config.json(or %APPDATA%\httpie\config.json on Windows).

The config directory can be changed by setting the $HTTPIE_CONFIG_DIRenvironment variable:

$ export HTTPIE_CONFIG_DIR=/tmp/httpie
$ http example.org

To view the exact location run http —debug.

Configurable options

Currently HTTPie offers a single configurable option:

default_options

An Array (by default empty) of default options that should be applied toevery invocation of HTTPie.

For instance, you can use this config option to change your default color theme:

$ cat ~/.httpie/config.json

{
    "default_options": [
      "--style=fruity"
    ]
}

Even though it is technically possible to include there any of HTTPie’soptions, it is not recommended to modify the default behaviour in a waythat would break your compatibility with the wider world as that cangenerate a lot of confusion.

Un-setting previously specified options

Default options from the config file, or specified any other way,can be unset for a particular invocation via —no-OPTION arguments passedon the command line (e.g., —no-style or —no-session).

Scripting

When using HTTPie from shell scripts, it can be handy to set the—check-status flag. It instructs HTTPie to exit with an error if theHTTP status is one of 3xx, 4xx, or 5xx. The exit status willbe 3 (unless —follow is set), 4, or 5,respectively.

#!/bin/bash
 
if http --check-status --ignore-stdin --timeout=2.5 HEAD example.org/health &> /dev/null; then
    echo 'OK!'
else
    case $? in
        2) echo 'Request timed out!' ;;
        3) echo 'Unexpected HTTP 3xx Redirection!' ;;
        4) echo 'HTTP 4xx Client Error!' ;;
        5) echo 'HTTP 5xx Server Error!' ;;
        6) echo 'Exceeded --max-redirects=<n> redirects!' ;;
        *) echo 'Other Error!' ;;
    esac
fi

Best practices

The default behaviour of automatically reading stdin is typically notdesirable during non-interactive invocations. You most likely want touse the —ignore-stdin option to disable it.

It is a common gotcha that without this option HTTPie seemingly hangs.What happens is that when HTTPie is invoked for example from a cron job,stdin is not connected to a terminal.Therefore, rules for redirected input apply, i.e., HTTPie starts to read itexpecting that the request body will be passed through.And since there's no data nor EOF, it will be stuck. So unless you'repiping some data to HTTPie, this flag should be used in scripts.

Also, it might be good to set a connection —timeout limit to preventyour program from hanging if the server never responds.

Meta

Interface design

The syntax of the command arguments closely corresponds to the actual HTTPrequests sent over the wire. It has the advantage that it's easy to rememberand read. It is often possible to translate an HTTP request to an HTTPieargument list just by inlining the request elements. For example, compare thisHTTP request:

POST /collection HTTP/1.1
X-API-Key: 123
User-Agent: Bacon/1.0
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
 
name=value&name2=value2

with the HTTPie command that sends it:

$ http -f POST example.org/collection \
  X-API-Key:123 \
  User-Agent:Bacon/1.0 \
  name=value \
  name2=value2

Notice that both the order of elements and the syntax is very similar,and that only a small portion of the command is used to control HTTPie anddoesn't directly correspond to any part of the request (here it's only -fasking HTTPie to send a form request).

The two modes, —pretty=all (default for terminal) and —pretty=none(default for redirected output), allow for both user-friendly interactive useand usage from scripts, where HTTPie serves as a generic HTTP client.

As HTTPie is still under heavy development, the existing command linesyntax and some of the —OPTIONS may change slightly beforeHTTPie reaches its final version 1.0. All changes are recorded in thechange log.

User support

Please use the following support channels:

• GitHub issuesfor bug reports and feature requests.
• Our Gitter chat roomto ask questions, discuss features, and for general discussion.
• StackOverflowto ask questions (please make sure to use thehttpie tag).
• Tweet directly to @clihttp.
• You can also tweet directly to @jakubroztocil.

Related projects

Dependencies

Under the hood, HTTPie uses these two amazing libraries:

• Requests— Python HTTP library for humans
• Pygments— Python syntax highlighter

HTTPie friends

HTTPie plays exceptionally well with the following tools:

• jq— CLI JSON processor thatworks great in conjunction with HTTPie
• http-prompt— interactive shell for HTTPie featuring autocompleteand command syntax highlighting

Alternatives

• httpcat — a lower-level sister utilityof HTTPie for constructing raw HTTP requests on the command line.
• curl — a "Swiss knife" command line tool andan exceptional library for transferring data with URLs.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.rst.

Change log

See CHANGELOG.

Artwork

• Logo by Cláudia Delgado.
• Animation by Allen Smith of GitHub.

Licence

BSD-3-Clause: LICENSE.

Authors

Jakub Roztocil (@jakubroztocil) created HTTPie and these fine peoplehave contributed.