I'm just starting to get into Python and using the command line more after a lifetime of mostly sticking to GUIs, and I'm really digging the "software for humans" vibe I'm finding in a few places. HTTPie is a good example, as is ncdu, which I just discovered this morning. Also anything by Kenneth Reitz.
The command line can be great for commanding, when it's done right, but it's not so great for most kinds of visualization, so CLI software that recognizes that and tries to compensate really helps.
HTTPie is awesome, the only thing to watch out for is if you use it for large JSON responses, it can take a while to parse, process and display the response. In that case cURL is still handier, but HTTPie is the tool I generally reach for
If you like httpie, http-prompt is a good add on for it, it lets you navigate through a rest API as if it is a filesystem (using cd for navigation), and lets you configure the arguments to pass to httpie for future requests.
Could we all just agree to stop using the adjective “modern”? It’s such a weasal word. If there are advantages to your program, describe them. Simply being “newer” or in the currently trendy style does not make it automatically better.
I’m not saying that this is a bad project. But “modern” doesn’t tell me anything about why I might want to use it.
It looks cool, but I don't really want to wait half a minute for it to do anything.
$ time curl cs.marlboro.college
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="https://cs.marlboro.college /">here</a>.</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu) Server at cs.marlboro.college Port 80</address>
</body></html>
real 0m0.269s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.005s
$ time http cs.marlboro.college
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 321
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2018 18:04:17 GMT
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Location: https://cs.marlboro.college/
Server: Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu)
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="https://cs.marlboro.college/">here</a>.</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu) Server at cs.marlboro.college Port 80</address>
</body></html>
real 0m30.553s
user 0m0.437s
sys 0m0.052s
I use httpie to view request and response headers. Very handy when you want to check something without worrying that a browser is caching something for some reason (like a redirect).
18 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 54.3 ms ] threadThe command line can be great for commanding, when it's done right, but it's not so great for most kinds of visualization, so CLI software that recognizes that and tries to compensate really helps.
[1] http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=168684
[2] http://www.editcorp.com/personal/lars_appel/wget/v1/wget_7.h...
I’m not saying that this is a bad project. But “modern” doesn’t tell me anything about why I might want to use it.
- much more sane command line syntax
- automatic formatting and highlighting of json/xml/html
- automatically show received headers
- reverts to unproccessed output when redirected
PROTIP: use 'cat' to type the body manually:
You can then start typing the message body. When done, press ctrl+d (EOF) and the request will send and the reply will be printed.And if you already have the body in a separate file, just pipe it through:
<mybody.json http post https://someapi.com/somenendpoint Authorization:sometoken