httpie

HTTPie is an open-source command-line HTTP client designed to make interacting with web services from the terminal more human-friendly. It provides a simple, expressive syntax for constructing HTTP requests and produces readable, colorized responses. HTTPie is built with Python and is intended as an intuitive alternative to curl for testing and debugging APIs.

Key features include support for standard HTTP methods, automatic JSON handling, form data, file uploads, and various authentication schemes. It can handle cookies and sessions, stream request bodies, and render output with syntax highlighting and structured formatting to improve readability. It also supports plugins and has extensible configuration options, including base URLs and default headers.

Usage examples demonstrate its readable approach: http GET https://httpbin.org/get; http POST https://httpbin.org/post name=value; http --session=username GET https://api.example.com/resource. The tool allows custom headers, query parameters, and authentication with -a or --auth, and can save and reuse sessions for subsequent requests.

HTTPie is cross-platform, running on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and can be installed via pip, Homebrew, or package managers. It is released under the MIT License and maintained by an open-source community. Since its initial release, it has gained popularity as a user-friendly alternative to lower-level HTTP clients for API development and debugging.