Inspecting Requests with HTTPie

Setting up HTTPie

The curl multipurpose tool is excellent for interacting with web APIs. But it’s a little cumbersome if we’re going to do it a lot. The HTTPie tool is an alternative that makes working with web requests a little easier.

Let’s install it through the package manager. On Ubuntu, we use apt:

$ sudo apt install httpie

Downloading files

The HTTPie tool supports downloading files, submitting forms, and even interacting with web applications that use sessions. But it really shines when making API requests. Let’s use it to get the list of notes from the API:

$ http localhost:3000/notes