Example Usage

HTTP verbs are specified as a positional argument, followed by the URL to be acted on. The goal is to reflect the feel of a standard HTTP header. For example:

$ http get http://localhost/

To provide a request body (e.g. for a POST or PUT), use the third positional argument:

$ http post http://localhost/documents '{"json": "document"}' --content-type="application/json"

Note the arbitrary request header being specified at the end as a normal CLI option. Any such trailing CLI options will be passed as request headers:

$ http get http://localhost/ --x-forwarded-for=10.0.0.50

This would be translated as X-Forwarded-For: 10.0.0.50 in the subsequent HTTP request. To illustrate this, we can enable verbose output:

$ http get http://localhost/ --x-forwarded-for=10.0.0.50
GET http://localhost/
X-Forwarded-For: 10.0.0.50

200 OK
Status: 200
Content-Length: 396
Content-Location: http://localhost/
Date: Wed, 30 May 2012 19:26:03 GMT
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "documents": [
    {
      "id": "c1be0fde3c0f4d27be15e1e3812cfd65b58325c3",
      "value": "a"
    },
    {
      "id": "67dc85dceacd3734ae53f1a69f56785dfe4c4c71",
      "value": "b"
    }
  ]
}

Built-In Help

Example help output:

$ http --help
usage: http [-h] [-t] method url [body] ...

Python HTTP CLI Client

positional arguments:
  method       HTTP method to use (OPTIONS, GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE,
               TRACE, CONNECT)
  url          URL to work with
  body         Request body
  headers      Additional request headers (keyword=value)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help   show this help message and exit
  -t, --terse  Only show the response body