HTTPie is a CLI HTTP utility built out of frustration with existing tools. The goal is to make CLI interaction with HTTP-based services as human-friendly as possible.

HTTPie does so by providing an http command that allows for issuing arbitrary HTTP requests using a simple and natural syntax and displaying colorized responses:

Under the hood, HTTPie uses the excellent Requests and Pygments Python libraries.

The latest stable version of HTTPie can always be installed (or updated to) via pip:

pip install -U httpie

Or, you can install the development version directly from GitHub:

pip install -U https://github.com/jkbr/httpie/tarball/master

Hello world:

http GET httpie.org

Synopsis:

http [flags] METHOD URL [items]

There are three types of key-value pair items available:

Headers

Arbitrary HTTP headers. The : character is used to separate a header's name from its value, e.g., X-API-Token:123.

Simple data items

Data items are included in the request body. Depending on the Content-Type, they are automatically serialized as a JSON Object (default) or application/x-www-form-urlencoded (the -f flag). Data items use = as the separator, e.g., hello=world.

Raw JSON items

This item type is needed when Content-Type is JSON and a field's value is a Boolean, Number, nested Object or an Array, because simple data items are always serialized as String. E.g. pies:=[1,2,3].

http PATCH api.example.com/person/1 X-API-Token:123 name=John email=john@example.org age:=29

The following request is issued:

PATCH /person/1 HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.1
X-API-Token: 123
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{"name": "John", "email": "john@example.org", "age": 29}

It can easily be changed to a 'form' request using the -f (or --form) flag, which produces:

PATCH /person/1 HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.1
X-API-Token: 123
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8

age=29&name=John&email=john%40example.org

A whole request body can be passed in via stdin instead:

echo '{"name": "John"}' | http PATCH example.com/person/1 X-API-Token:123
# Or:
http POST example.com/person/1 X-API-Token:123 < person.json

Most of the flags mirror the arguments understood by requests.request. See http -h for more details:

usage: http [-h] [--version] [--json | --form] [--traceback]
            [--pretty | --ugly] [--headers | --body] [--style STYLE]
            [--auth AUTH] [--verify VERIFY] [--proxy PROXY]
            [--allow-redirects] [--file PATH] [--timeout TIMEOUT]
            METHOD URL [items [items ...]]

HTTPie - cURL for humans.

positional arguments:
  METHOD                HTTP method to be used for the request (GET, POST,
                        PUT, DELETE, PATCH, ...).
  URL                   Protocol defaults to http:// if the URL does not
                        include it.
  items                 HTTP header (key:value), data field (key=value) or raw
                        JSON field (field:=value).

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  --json, -j            Serialize data items as a JSON object and set Content-
                        Type to application/json, if not specified.
  --form, -f            Serialize data items as form values and set Content-
                        Type to application/x-www-form-urlencoded, if not
                        specified.
  --traceback           Print exception traceback should one occur.
  --pretty, -p          If stdout is a terminal, the response is prettified by
                        default (colorized and indented if it is JSON). This
                        flag ensures prettifying even when stdout is
                        redirected.
  --ugly, -u            Do not prettify the response.
  --headers, -t         Print only the response headers.
  --body, -b            Print only the response body.
  --style STYLE, -s STYLE
                        Output coloring style, one of autumn, borland, bw,
                        colorful, default, emacs, friendly, fruity, manni,
                        monokai, murphy, native, pastie, perldoc, solarized,
                        tango, trac, vim, vs. Defaults to solarized.
  --auth AUTH, -a AUTH  username:password
  --verify VERIFY       Set to "yes" to check the host's SSL certificate. You
                        can also pass the path to a CA_BUNDLE file for private
                        certs. You can also set the REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE
                        environment variable.
  --proxy PROXY         String mapping protocol to the URL of the proxy (e.g.
                        http:foo.bar:3128).
  --allow-redirects     Set this flag if full redirects are allowed (e.g. re-
                        POST-ing of data at new ``Location``)
  --file PATH           File to multipart upload
  --timeout TIMEOUT     Float describes the timeout of the request (Use
                        socket.setdefaulttimeout() as fallback).

View contributors on GitHub.

• 0.1.6 (2012-03-04)