rust-http

Implementing a CLI HTTP 1.1 client from (mostly) scratch in Rust, using:

• Clap for argument parsing
• hyperium/http for HTTP request/response types
  • This crate is intended to be a set of "common" types, so theoretically this client could work with any other rust code that expects request/response types from this crate
  • Please dont actually use it like that, use another library that's properly maintained
• native_tls for HTTPS support using native OS implementations

Building request messages and parsing response messages is all manually done for fun.

cURL-inspired, of course.

Usage

# GET request (shows response body)
$ httpc get https://httpbin.org/get
# GET request but verbose (includes response headers)
$ httpc get -v https://httpbin.org/get
# GET request but very verbose (includes request HTTP message + Response headers)
$ httpc get -vv https://httpbin.org/get
# Query parameters are provided in the URI (make sure you escape the characters according to your shell)
$ httpc get 'https://httpbin.org/get?foo=123&bar=456'
# POST request with data (Content-Length is automatically calculated and set, you only need to provide Content-Type)
$ httpc post -h 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"cool": 1}' https://httpbin.org/post
# POST request with data from a file
$ httpc post -h 'Content-Type: application/json' -f ./data.json https://httpbin.org/post
# GET request and save response body to a file
$ httpc get -o ./file.json https://httpbin.org/get
# GET request and follow redirects
$ httpc get -lv https://httpbin.org/redirect/3

Building

cargo build

This builds a debug release for your current platform, for release builds use --release and for other platforms see the rustup docs

Why?

School gave me this as an assignment. They suggested C, Go, Python, Java, or NodeJS. I wanted to learn Rust, so I get to enjoy borrow-checking.

TODO

(?) = If I have time

• (?) Reuse connection for following redirects? (map host -> connection?)
• (?) Return Response<SomeKindOfStream>? Display headers while the body loads (or even incrementally display body?)
• (?) Progress bar? -p