Description:

readmetest 8.9.1

HTTPie (pronounced aitch-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.



Contents

1 Main features
2 Installation

2.1 macOS
2.2 Linux
2.3 Windows, etc.
2.4 Development version
2.5 Python version


3 Usage

3.1 Examples


4 HTTP method
5 Request URL

5.1 Querystring parameters
5.2 URL shortcuts for localhost
5.3 Custom default scheme


6 Request items

6.1 Escaping rules


7 JSON

7.1 Default behaviour
7.2 Explicit JSON
7.3 Non-string JSON fields


8 Forms

8.1 Regular forms
8.2 File upload forms


9 HTTP headers

9.1 Default request headers
9.2 Empty headers and header un-setting


10 Authentication

10.1 Basic auth
10.2 Digest auth
10.3 Password prompt
10.4 .netrc
10.5 Auth plugins


11 HTTP redirects

11.1 Follow Location
11.2 Showing intermediary redirect responses
11.3 Limiting maximum redirects followed


12 Proxies

12.1 Environment variables
12.2 SOCKS


13 HTTPS

13.1 Server SSL certificate verification
13.2 Custom CA bundle
13.3 Client side SSL certificate
13.4 SSL version
13.5 SNI (Server Name Indication)


14 Output options

14.1 What parts of the HTTP exchange should be printed
14.2 Viewing intermediary requests/responses
14.3 Conditional body download


15 Redirected Input

15.1 Request data from a filename


16 Terminal output

16.1 Colors and formatting
16.2 Binary data


17 Redirected output
18 Download mode

18.1 Downloaded file name
18.2 Piping while downloading
18.3 Resuming downloads
18.4 Other notes


19 Streamed responses

19.1 Disabling buffering
19.2 Examples use cases


20 Sessions

20.1 Named sessions
20.2 Anonymous sessions
20.3 Readonly session


21 Config

21.1 Config file location
21.2 Configurable options

21.2.1 default_options
21.2.2 __meta__


21.3 Un-setting previously specified options


22 Scripting

22.1 Best practices


23 Meta

23.1 Interface design
23.2 User support
23.3 Related projects

23.3.1 Dependencies
23.3.2 HTTPie friends


23.4 Contributing
23.5 Change log
23.6 Artwork
23.7 Licence
23.8 Authors





1 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



2 Installation

2.1 macOS
On macOS, HTTPie can be installed via Homebrew
(recommended):
$ brew install httpie
A MacPorts port is also available:
$ port install httpie


2.2 Linux
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

# Arch Linux
$ pacman -S httpie


2.3 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 try
easy_install httpie as a fallback.)


2.4 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/archive/master.tar.gz


2.5 Python version
Although Python 2.6 and 2.7 are supported as well, it is recommended to install
HTTPie against the latest Python 3.x whenever possible. That will ensure that
some of the newer HTTP features, such as SNI (Server Name Indication),
work out of the box.
Python 3 is the default for Homebrew installations starting with version 0.9.4.
To see which version HTTPie uses, run http --debug.



3 Usage
Hello World:
$ http httpie.org
Synopsis:
$ http [flags] [METHOD] URL [ITEM [ITEM]]
See also http --help.

3.1 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 an
issue
with authentication:
$ http -a USERNAME POST https://api.github.com/repos/jkbrzt/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 persistent
between 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



4 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 to
either GET (with no request data) or POST (with request data).


5 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.

5.1 Querystring parameters
If you find yourself manually constructing URLs with
on the terminal, you may appreciate the param==value syntax for appending
URL parameters. With that, you don’t have to worry about escaping the &
separators for your shell. Also, special characters in parameter values,
will also automatically escaped (HTTPie otherwise expects the URL to be
already escaped). To search for HTTPie logo on Google Images you could use
this command:
$ http www.google.com search=='HTTPie logo' tbm==isch
GET /?search=HTTPie+logo&tbm=isch HTTP/1.1


5.2 URL shortcuts for localhost
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


5.3 Custom default scheme
You can use the --default-scheme <URL_SCHEME> option to create
shortcuts for other protocols than HTTP:
$ alias https='http --default-scheme=https'



6 Request items
There are a few different request item types that provide a
convenient mechanism for specifying HTTP headers, simple JSON and
form data, files, and URL parameters.
They are key/value pairs specified after the URL. All have in
common that they become part of the actual request that is sent and that
their type is distinguished only by the separator used:
:, =, :=, ==, @, =@, and :=@. The ones with an
@ expect a file path as value.


Item Type
Description



HTTP Headers
Name:Value
Arbitrary HTTP header, e.g. X-API-Token:123.

URL parameters
name==value
Appends the given name/value pair as a query
string parameter to the URL.
The == separator is used.

Data Fields
field=value,
field=@file.txt
Request data fields to be serialized as a JSON
object (default), or to be form-encoded
(--form, -f).

Raw JSON fields
field:=json,
field:=@file.json
Useful when sending JSON and one or
more fields need to be a Boolean, Number,
nested Object, or an Array, e.g.,
meals:='["ham","spam"]' or pies:=[1,2,3]
(note the quotes).

Form File Fields
field@/dir/file
Only available with --form, -f.
For example screenshot@~/Pictures/img.png.
The presence of a file field results
in a multipart/form-data request.



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

6.1 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/value
pair (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 special
token -- 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": "value"
}



7 JSON
JSON is the lingua franca of modern web services and it is also the
implicit content type HTTPie by default uses.
Simple example:
$ http PUT example.org name=John email=john@example.org
PUT / HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json, */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/json
Host: example.org

{
"name": "John",
"email": "john@example.org"
}

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


Content-Type
application/json

Accept
application/json, */*





7.2 Explicit JSON
You can use --json, -j to explicitly set Accept
to 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 the
Content-Type is incorrectly text/plain or unknown.


7.3 Non-string JSON fields
Non-string fields use the := separator, which allows you to embed raw JSON
into the resulting object. Text and raw JSON files can also be embedded into
fields using =@ and :=@:
$ 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": "http://httpie.org",
}
}
Please note that with this syntax the command gets unwieldy when sending
complex data. In that case it’s always better to use redirected input:
$ http POST api.example.com/person/1 < person.json



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

8.1 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


8.2 File upload forms
If one or more file fields is present, the serialization and content type is
multipart/form-data:
$ http -f POST example.com/jobs name='John Smith' cv@~/Documents/cv.pdf
The request above is the same as if the following HTML form were
submitted:
<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
=@ just embeds the file content as a regular text field value.



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

9.1 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 those—except for Host—can be overwritten and some of them unset.


9.2 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;'



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


--auth, -a
Pass a username:password pair as
the argument. Or, if you only specify a username
(-a username), you’ll be prompted for
the password before the request is sent.
To send an empty password, pass username:.
The username:password@hostname URL syntax is
supported as well (but credentials passed via -a
have higher priority).

--auth-type, -A
Specify the auth mechanism. Possible values are
basic and digest. The default value is
basic so it can often be omitted.




10.1 Basic auth
$ http -a username:password example.org


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


10.3 Password prompt
$ http -a username example.org


10.4 .netrc
Authorization information from your ~/.netrc file is honored as well:
$ cat ~/.netrc
machine httpbin.org
login httpie
password test

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


10.5 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




11 HTTP redirects
By default, HTTP redirects are not followed and only the first
response is shown:
$ http httpbin.org/redirect/3

11.1 Follow Location
To instruct HTTPie to follow the Location header of 30x responses
and show the final response instead, use the --follow, -F option:
$ http --follow httpbin.org/redirect/3


11.2 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


11.3 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



12 Proxies
You can specify proxies to be used through the --proxy argument for each
protocol (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:pass@10.10.1.10:3128 example.org

12.1 Environment variables
You can also configure proxies by environment variables HTTP_PROXY and
HTTPS_PROXY, and the underlying Requests library will pick them up as well.
If you want to disable proxies configured through the 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


12.2 SOCKS
To enable SOCKS proxy support please install requests[socks] using pip:
$ pip install -U requests[socks]
Usage is the same as for other types of proxies:
$ http --proxy=http:socks5://user:pass@host:port --proxy=https:socks5://user:pass@host:port example.org



13 HTTPS

13.1 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


13.2 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


13.3 Client side SSL certificate
To use a client side certificate for the SSL communication, you can pass
the 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 the
path of the key file with --cert-key:
$ http --cert=client.crt --cert-key=client.key https://example.org


13.4 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 both
the server and your installation of OpenSSL support. The available protocols
are ssl2.3, ssl3, tls1, tls1.1, tls1.2. (The actually
available 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


13.5 SNI (Server Name Indication)
If you use HTTPie with Python version lower than 2.7.9
(can be verified with http --debug) and need to talk to servers that
use SNI (Server Name Indication) you need to install some additional
dependencies:
$ pip install --upgrade requests[security]
You can use the following command to test SNI support:
$ http https://sni.velox.ch



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


--headers, -h
Only the response headers are printed.

--body, -b
Only the response body is printed.

--verbose, -v
Print the whole HTTP exchange (request and response).
This option also enables --all (see bellow).

--print, -p
Selects parts of the HTTP exchange.



--verbose can often be useful for debugging the request and generating
documentation 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

{
[…]
}

14.1 What parts of the HTTP exchange should be printed
All the other output options are under the hood just shortcuts for
the more powerful --print, -p. It accepts a string of characters each
of which represents a specific part of the HTTP exchange:


Character
Stands for



H
request headers

B
request body

h
response headers

b
response body



Print request and response headers:
$ http --print=Hh PUT httpbin.org/put hello=world


14.2 Viewing intermediary requests/responses
To see all the HTTP communication, i.e. the final request/response as
well as any possible intermediary requests/responses, use the --all
option. The intermediary HTTP communication include followed redirects
(with --follow), the first unauthorized request when HTTP digest
authentication 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 change
that, use the --history-print, -P option. It takes the same
arguments 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


14.3 Conditional body download
As an optimization, the response body is downloaded from the server
only if it’s part of the output. This is similar to performing a HEAD
request, 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 is
updated, but you are only interested in the response headers to see the
status 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 server
is closed as soon as all the response headers have been received.
Therefore, bandwidth and time isn’t wasted downloading the body
which you don’t care about. The response headers are downloaded always,
even if they are not part of the output



15 Redirected Input
The universal method for passing request data is through redirected stdin
(standard input)—piping. Such data is buffered and then with no further
processing used as the request body. There are multiple useful ways to use
piping:
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 even pipe web services together using HTTPie:
$ http GET https://api.github.com/repos/jkbrzt/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 specified
on 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.

15.1 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-Type
header is automatically set to the appropriate value based on the
filename extension. For example, the following request sends the
verbatim contents of that XML file with Content-Type: application/xml:
$ http PUT httpbin.org/put @/data/file.xml



16 Terminal output
HTTPie does several things by default in order to make its terminal output
easy to read.

16.1 Colors and formatting
Syntax highlighting is applied to HTTP headers and bodies (where it makes
sense). You can choose your preferred color scheme via the --style option
if you don’t like the default one (see $ http --help for the possible
values).
Also, the following formatting is applied:

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

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


--pretty=all
Apply both colors and formatting.
Default for terminal output.

--pretty=colors
Apply colors.

--pretty=format
Apply formatting.

--pretty=none
Disables output processing.
Default for redirected output.





16.2 Binary data
Binary data is suppressed for terminal output, which makes it safe to perform
requests to URLs that send back binary data. Binary data is suppressed also in
redirected, but prettified output. The connection is closed as soon as we know
that 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 |
+-----------------------------------------+



17 Redirected output
HTTPie uses a different set of defaults for redirected output than for
terminal 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 and
downloading files work with no extra flags. Most of the time, only the raw
response 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 in
less pager:
$ http --pretty=all --verbose example.org | less -R
The -R flag tells less to interpret color escape sequences included
HTTPie`s output.
You can create a shortcut for invoking HTTPie with colorized and paged output
by adding the following to your ~/.bash_profile:
function httpless {
# `httpless example.org'
http --pretty=all --print=hb "$@" | less -R;
}


18 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 to
the terminal (stderr), and a progress bar is shown while the response body
is being saved to a file.
$ http --download https://github.com/jkbrzt/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)

18.1 Downloaded file name
If not provided via --output, -o, the output filename will be determined
from Content-Disposition (if available), or from the URL and
Content-Type. If the guessed filename already exists, HTTPie adds a unique
suffix to it.


18.2 Piping while downloading
You can also redirect the response body to another program while the response
headers and progress are still shown in the terminal:
$ http -d https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie/archive/master.tar.gz | tar zxf -


18.3 Resuming downloads
If --output, -o is specified, you can resume a partial download using the
--continue, -c option. This only works with servers that support
Range requests and 206 Partial Content responses. If the server doesn’t
support that, the whole file will simply be downloaded:
$ http -dco file.zip example.org/file


18.4 Other notes

The --download option only changes how the response body is treated.
You can still set custom headers, use sessions, --verbose, -v, etc.
--download always implies --follow (redirects are followed).
HTTPie exits with status code 1 (error) if the body hasn’t been fully
downloaded.
Accept-Encoding cannot be set with --download.




19 Streamed responses
Responses are downloaded and printed in chunks which allows for streaming
and large file downloads without using too much memory. However, when
colors and formatting is applied, the whole response is buffered and only
then processed at once.

19.1 Disabling buffering
You can use the --stream, -S flag to make two things happen:

The output is flushed in much smaller chunks without any buffering,
which makes HTTPie behave kind of like tail -f for URLs.
Streaming becomes enabled even when the output is prettified: It will be
applied to each line of the response and flushed immediately. This makes
it possible to have a nice output for long-lived requests, such as one
to the Twitter streaming API.



19.2 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



20 Sessions
By default, every request HTTPie makes is completely independent of any
previous ones to the same host.
However, HTTPie also supports persistent
sessions via the --session=SESSION_NAME_OR_PATH option. In a session,
custom headers—except for the ones starting with Content- or If-—,
authorization, and cookies
(manually specified or sent by the server) persist between requests
to 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 text
editor—they are regular JSON.

20.1 Named sessions
You can create one or more named session per host. For example, this is how
you can create a new session named user1 for example.org:
$ http --session=user1 -a user1:password example.org X-Foo:Bar
From now onw, you can refer to the session by its name. When you choose to
use the session again, any the previously used authorization and HTTP headers
will 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’ data is stored in JSON files in the directory
~/.httpie/sessions/<host>/<name>.json
(%APPDATA%\httpie\sessions\<host>\<name>.json on Windows).


20.2 Anonymous sessions
Instead of a name, you can also directly specify a path to a session file. This
allows 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


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



21 Config
HTTPie uses a simple JSON config file.

21.1 Config file location
The default location of the configuration file is ~/.httpie/config.json
(or %APPDATA%\httpie\config.json on Windows). The config directory
location can be changed by setting the HTTPIE_CONFIG_DIR
environment variable. To view the exact location run http --debug.


21.2 Configurable options
The JSON file contains an object with the following keys:

21.2.1 default_options
An Array (by default empty) of default options that should be applied to
every invocation of HTTPie.
For instance, you can use this option to change the default style and output
options: "default_options": ["--style=fruity", "--body"] Another useful
default option could be "--session=default" to make HTTPie always
use sessions (one named default will automatically be used).
Or you could change the implicit request content type from JSON to form by
adding --form to the list.


21.2.2 __meta__
HTTPie automatically stores some of its metadata here. Please do not change.



21.3 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 passed
on the command line (e.g., --no-style or --no-session).



22 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 the
HTTP status is one of 3xx, 4xx, or 5xx. The exit status will
be 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

22.1 Best practices
The default behaviour of automatically reading stdin is typically not
desirable during non-interactive invocations. You most likely want
use 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 it
expecting that the request body will be passed through.
And since there’s no data nor EOF, it will be stuck. So unless you’re
piping some data to HTTPie, this flag should be used in scripts.
Also, it’s might be good to override the default 30 second --timeout to
something that suits you.



23 Meta

23.1 Interface design
The syntax of the command arguments closely corresponds to the actual HTTP
requests sent over the wire. It has the advantage that it’s easy to remember
and read. It is often possible to translate an HTTP request to an HTTPie
argument list just by inlining the request elements. For example, compare this
HTTP 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 and
doesn’t directly correspond to any part of the request (here it’s only -f
asking 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 use
and usage from scripts, where HTTPie serves as a generic HTTP client.
As HTTPie is still under heavy development, the existing command line
syntax and some of the --OPTIONS may change slightly before
HTTPie reaches its final version 1.0. All changes are recorded in the
change log.


23.2 User support
Please use the following support channels:

GitHub issues
for bug reports and feature requests.
Our Gitter chat room
to ask questions, discuss features, and for general discussion.
StackOverflow
to ask questions (please make sure to use the
httpie tag).
Tweet directly to @clihttp.
You can also tweet directly to @jkbrzt.



23.3 Related projects

23.3.1 Dependencies
Under the hood, HTTPie uses these two amazing libraries:

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



23.3.2 HTTPie friends
HTTPie plays exceptionally well with the following tools:

jq
— CLI JSON processor that
works great in conjunction with HTTPie
http-prompt
— interactive shell for HTTPie featuring autocomplete
and command syntax highlighting




23.4 Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.rst.


23.5 Change log
See CHANGELOG.


23.6 Artwork
See claudiatd/httpie-artwork


23.7 Licence
BSD-3-Clause: LICENSE.


23.8 Authors
Jakub Roztocil (@jkbrzt) created HTTPie and these fine people
have contributed.

License

For personal and professional use. You cannot resell or redistribute these repositories in their original state.

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