http-cli

A shell script that acts like a teammate.

http-cli is a minimal yet powerful Bash-based HTTP client built around curl, designed to be quiet by default, expressive when needed, and easily composable in scripting environments.

Features

• Supports custom methods, headers, and body formats (JSON, form-encoded, files)
• Cookie jar management and proxy support
• Configurable timeout, verbosity, and engine flags
• Inline or file-based configuration via ~/.http-cli.conf
• Optional header and status code dumping
• Clean CLI interface and easily extendable design

Usage examples

http-cli https://httpbin.org/robots.txt

http-cli --user-agent "http-cli/0.1 (https://github.com/ql4b/http-cli)" \
    https://httpbin.org/user-agent

http-cli --dump-header - --status-codes \
    https://httpbin.org/status/204

Full help

http-cli --help

Configuration

You can define default settings in ~/.http-cli.conf:

USER_AGENT="http-cli/0.1 (https://github.com/ql4b/http-cli)"
TIMEOUT=10

Release Strategy

This project uses semantic-release to automate versioning and changelog generation.

• Commits to main trigger stable releases (e.g. v1.2.3)

Releases are based on Conventional Commits, so use commit messages like:

• feat: add new feature
• fix: correct bug
• chore: update metadata

Development Workflow

Start from main your feature branch as in

git fetch origin
git switch -c feat/something origin/main

Make your changes and any commit to the feature branch as you wish.

When you are ready to promote your changes to main, from your local branch:

git switch main
git pull --rebase origin main
git switch feat/something
git rebase -i main

Add you fixups and edit the first commit message in a way that it represents your PR intent (chore:, fix:, feat: etc).

Now you push your feature branch and create the PR against main

git push -u origin feat/something

Release Workflow

To publish your changes open a PR and wait for a review before merge.