HTTPie: a CLI, cURL-like tool for humans

I&#x27;ve been using HTTPie a lot more recently. It really takes the tedium out of using curl and I can produce color coded output for people. However, I am still finding myself in situations where I can&#x27;t figure out how to induce the correct request. In other words, the user friendliness of being able to do things like construct JSON from parameters is great until it isn&#x27;t.<p>Is there anything similar for GUI users? The standalone application form of Postman is popular with some coworkers for general HTTP work as is Fiddler on Windows.

First off, I am really surprised how often this gets re-posted to HN. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=httpie&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;prefix&amp;page=0&amp;dateRange=all&amp;type=story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=httpie&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;prefi...</a><p>I discovered HTTPie a few years back and it has completely replaced curl&#x2F;wget during our API development and testing.

Forgot to mention that when dealing with JSON APIs, httpie + jq is a killer combo.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stedolan.github.io&#x2F;jq&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stedolan.github.io&#x2F;jq&#x2F;</a>

Almost 20k stars. That&#x27;s quite incredible for a project especially since I have never heard of it before now.

I really like this because by default it gives all of the http headers and makes everything look really nice. Curl still has its place, and I wouldn&#x27;t dream of replacing it, but I would definitely use this as a sort of command line shortcut. Cool project.

Previously discussed at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10418882" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10418882</a>. More at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=HTTPie%20points%3E5&amp;sort=byDate&amp;dateRange=all&amp;type=story&amp;storyText=false&amp;prefix&amp;page=0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=HTTPie%20points%3E5&amp;sort=byDat...</a>

There&#x27;s also a nice auto-complete utility built on top of HTTPie:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;eliangcs&#x2F;http-prompt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;eliangcs&#x2F;http-prompt</a>

I like using HTTPie for many things, however the current release does a bad job of rendering XML, e.g. it&#x27;ll display `&lt;sitemapindex xmlns=&quot;<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;…&quot;&gt;`" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;…&quot;&gt;`</a> as `&lt;ns0:sitemapindex xmlns:ns0=&quot;<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;…&quot;&gt;`" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;…&quot;&gt;`</a>. But — I just checked and found the not-yet-released v1.0.0 fixes this by removing the XML formatter completely as discussed in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jkbrzt&#x2F;httpie&#x2F;issues&#x2F;443" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jkbrzt&#x2F;httpie&#x2F;issues&#x2F;443</a> so my gripe is sorted.<p>I still tend to go back to cURL when I want to see exactly what&#x27;s been received, and use httpie for when I know the response headers and body serialization are fine and I want to see the data therein.

I keep switching between curl + jq vs httpie. Lately I&#x27;ve been using mostly httpie. It is a great tool. One of my favorite things is it builds json objects (say for &#x27;put&#x27; and &#x27;post&#x27; for example) using command line arguments. So can have:<p><pre><code> $ http put url key1=val1 key2=val2 </code></pre> If one of the fields is a larger nested object can use :=<p><pre><code> $ http put url key1=simpleval1 key2:=&#x27;{literaljson...}&#x27;</code></pre>

I don&#x27;t use this kind of programs all the time (but I did last week) so I eventually forget that I installed httpie and end up using curl or wget. I should alias curl to httpie and use \curl for when I really need curl.

One of the first tools I install every time I buy a new machine

Incredible

Right, let&#x27;s take the human denomination away from people that use cURL...