Go implemented CLI cURL-like tool for humans. gURL can be used for testing, debugging, and generally interacting with HTTP servers.
Forked from bat, as bugs weren't being fixed. Profound thanks for their contributions! Inspired by httpie. Thanks to the author, Jakub.
- Main Features
- Installation
- Usage
- HTTP Method
- Request URL
- Request Items
- JSON
- Forms
- HTTP Headers
- Authentication
- Signatures
- Proxies
- Expressive and intuitive syntax
- Built-in JSON support
- Forms and file uploads
- HTTPS, proxies, signatures, and authentication
- Arbitrary request data
- Custom headers
go get -u github.com/skunkwerks/gurl
make sure the $GOPATH/bin is added into $PATH
Hello World:
$ gurl beego.me
Synopsis:
gurl [flags] [METHOD] URL [ITEM [ITEM]]
See also gurl --help.
Basic settings - HTTP method, HTTP headers and JSON data:
$ gurl PUT example.org X-API-Token:123 name=John
Any custom HTTP method (such as WebDAV, etc.):
$ gurl -method=PROPFIND example.org name=John
Submitting forms:
$ gurl -form=true POST example.org hello=World
See the request that is being sent using one of the output options:
$ gurl -print="Hhb" example.org
Use Github API to post a comment on an issue with authentication:
$ gurl -a USERNAME POST https://api.github.com/repos/skunkwerks/gurl/issues/1/comments body='gurl is awesome!'
Upload a file using redirected input:
$ gurl example.org < file.json
Download a file and save it via redirected output:
$ gurl example.org/file > file
Download a file wget style:
$ gurl -download=true example.org/file
Set a custom Host header to work around missing DNS records:
$ gurl localhost:8000 Host:example.com
Following is the detailed documentation. It covers the command syntax, advanced usage, and also features additional examples.
The name of the HTTP method comes right before the URL argument:
$ gurl DELETE example.org/todos/7
which looks similar to the actual Request-Line that is sent:
DELETE /todos/7 HTTP/1.1
When the METHOD argument is omitted from the command, gurl defaults to either GET (if there is no request data) or POST (with request data).
The only information gurl needs to perform a request is a URL. The
default scheme is, somewhat unsurprisingly, http://, and can be omitted
from the argument – gurl example.org works just fine.
Additionally, curl-like shorthand for localhost is supported. This means that, for example :3000 would expand to http://localhost:3000 If the port is omitted, then port 80 is assumed.
$ gurl :/foo
GET /foo HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
$ gurl :3000/bar
GET /bar HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:3000
$ gurl :
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
If you find yourself manually constructing URLs with query string
parameters on the terminal, you may appreciate the param=value syntax
for appending URL parameters so that you don't have to worry about
escaping the & separators. To search for gurl on Google Images you could
use this command:
$ gurl GET www.google.com search=gurl tbm=isch
GET /?search=gurl&tbm=isch HTTP/1.1
There are a few different request item types that provide a convenient mechanism for specifying HTTP headers, simple JSON and form data, files, and URL parameters.
They are key/value pairs specified after the URL. All have in common
that they become part of the actual request that is sent and that their
type is distinguished only by the separator used: :, =, :=, @,
=@, and :=@. The ones with an @ expect a file path as value.
| Item Type | Description |
|---|---|
HTTP Headers Name:Value |
Arbitrary HTTP header, e.g. X-API-Token:123. |
Data Fields field=value |
Request data fields to be serialized as a JSON object (default), or to be form-encoded (--form, -f). |
Form File Fields field@/dir/file |
Only available with -form, -f. For example screenshot@~/Pictures/img.png. The presence of a file field results in a multipart/form-data request. |
Form Fields from file field=@file.txt |
read content from file as value |
Raw JSON fields field:=json, field:=@file.json |
Useful when sending JSON and one or more fields need to be a Boolean, Number, nested Object, or an Array, e.g., meals:='["ham","spam"]' or pies:=[1,2,3] (note the quotes). |
You can use \ to escape characters that shouldn't be used as
separators (or parts thereof). For instance, foo==bar will become a
data key/value pair (foo= and bar) instead of a URL parameter.
You can also quote values, e.g. foo="bar baz".
JSON is the lingua franca of modern web services and it is also the implicit content type gurl by default uses:
If your command includes some data items, they are serialized as a JSON object by default. gurl also automatically sets the following headers, both of which can be overridden:
| header | value |
|---|---|
| Content-Type | application/json |
| Accept | application/json |
You can use --json=true, -j=true to explicitly set Accept to
application/json regardless of whether you are sending data (it's a
shortcut for setting the header via the usual header notation –
gurl url Accept:application/json).
Simple example:
$ gurl PUT example.org name=John email=john@example.org
PUT / HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/json
Host: example.org
{
"name": "John",
"email": "john@example.org"
}
Even custom/vendored media types that have a json format are getting
detected, as long as they implement a json type response and contain a
json in their declared form:
$ gurl GET example.org/user/1 Accept:application/vnd.example.v2.0+json
GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/vnd.example.v2.0+json
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/vnd.example.v2.0+json
Host: example.org
{
"name": "John",
"email": "john@example.org"
}
Non-string fields use the := separator, which allows you to embed raw JSON into the resulting object. Text and raw JSON files can also be embedded into fields using =@ and :=@:
$ gurl PUT api.example.com/person/1 \
name=John \
age:=29 married:=false hobbies:='["http", "pies"]' \ # Raw JSON
description=@about-john.txt \ # Embed text file
bookmarks:=@bookmarks.json # Embed JSON file
PUT /person/1 HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Content-Type: application/json
Host: api.example.com
{
"age": 29,
"hobbies": [
"http",
"pies"
],
"description": "John is a nice guy who likes pies.",
"married": false,
"name": "John",
"bookmarks": {
"HTTPie": "http://httpie.org",
}
}
Send JSON data stored in a file (see redirected input for more examples):
$ gurl POST api.example.com/person/1 < person.json
Submitting forms are very similar to sending JSON requests. Often the
only difference is in adding the -form=true, -f option, which
ensures that data fields are serialized correctly and Content-Type is
set to, application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8.
It is possible to make form data the implicit content type instead of JSON via the config file.
$ gurl -f=true POST api.example.org/person/1 name='John Smith' \
email=john@example.org
POST /person/1 HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8
name=John+Smith&email=john%40example.org
If one or more file fields is present, the serialization and content
type is multipart/form-data:
$ gurl -f=true POST example.com/jobs name='John Smith' cv@~/Documents/cv.pdf
The request above is the same as if the following HTML form were submitted:
<form enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post" action="http://example.com/jobs">
<input type="text" name="name" />
<input type="file" name="cv" />
</form>
Note that @ is used to simulate a file upload form field.
To set custom headers you can use the Header:Value notation:
$ gurl example.org User-Agent:Bacon/1.0 'Cookie:valued-visitor=yes;foo=bar' \
X-Foo:Bar Referer:http://beego.me/
GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Cookie: valued-visitor=yes;foo=bar
Host: example.org
Referer: http://beego.me/
User-Agent: Bacon/1.0
X-Foo: Bar
There are a couple of default headers that gurl sets:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: gurl/<version>
Host: <taken-from-URL>
Any of the default headers can be overridden.
HMAC signatures are provided only over the body content, not query parameters, and obviously not headers themselves. Thus, you can only guarantee authenticity and unaltered content over the body. Do not use this property and assume that headers or query parameters can be trusted.
Include a custom HMAC signature header from an environment variable:
$ export HMAC=sha256:x-hub-signature:very_secret
$ gurl -hmac=HMAC httpbin.org/post key=value
...
x-hub-signature: sha256=ac4e6fc055a6f51a43fa3868c3af06e382867bf25be59702b38f236466b19df3
{"key":"value"}
HMAC signatures can be verified manually using:
printf 'data' | openssl dgst -sha256 -hmac <secret> -out -
Basic auth:
$ gurl -a=username:password example.org
You can specify proxies to be used through the --proxy argument for each protocol (which is included in the value in case of redirects across protocols):
$ gurl --proxy=http://10.10.1.10:3128 example.org
With Basic authentication:
$ gurl --proxy=http://user:pass@10.10.1.10:3128 example.org
You can also configure proxies by environment variables HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY, and the underlying Requests library will pick them up as well. If you want to disable proxies configured through the environment variables for certain hosts, you can specify them in NO_PROXY.
In your ~/.bash_profile:
export HTTP_PROXY=http://10.10.1.10:3128
export HTTPS_PROXY=https://10.10.1.10:1080
export NO_PROXY=localhost,example.com