httpAWS: a command line HTTP tool for AWS Services
httpAWS is a command line HTTP client for AWS services. Its goal is to make CLI interaction with AWS web services as
human-friendly as possible. It provides a simple httpaws
command that allows for sending HTTP requests to AWS
services using a simple and natural syntax, and displays colorized output. httpAWS can be used for testing, debugging,
and generally interacting direly with AWS services with HTTP requests.
httpAWS directly makes HTTP calls to AWS service endpoints using the requests and
aws-requests-auth modules.
This is a low-level command-line tool intended for use by developers so that they can easily make direct HTTP calls
to AWS services. It is effectively a command-line programmatic replacement for using a graphical tool like
Postman and was inspired by tools like HTTPie but is specific to
AWS services.
Main features
- Expressive and intuitive syntax
- Formatted and colorized terminal output
- Built-in XML support
- Python 2.7 and 3.x support
- Linux, macOS and Windows support
Installation
A universal installation method (that works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, …,
and always provides the latest version) is to use pip:
$ pip install --upgrade pip setuptools
$ pip install --upgrade httpaws
(If pip
installation fails for some reason, you can try easy_install httpaws
as a fallback.)
Python version
Although Python 2.7 is supported as well, it is strongly recommended to
install httpAWS against the latest Python 3.x whenever possible. That will
ensure that some of the newer HTTP features, such as
SNI (Server Name Indication), work out of the box.
Python 3 is the default for Homebrew installations starting with version 0.9.4.
Unstable version
You can also install the latest unreleased development version directly from
the master
branch on GitHub. It is a work-in-progress of a future stable
release so the experience might be not as smooth.
$ pip install -U https://github.com/http-aws/http-aws/archive/master.tar.gz
Usage
Hello World:
$ httpaws -s ec2 DescribeVpcs
Synopsis:
$ httpaws [flags] <API>
See also httpaws -h
for detailed help:
$ httpaws -h
usage: httpaws [-h] [-r REGION] [-s SERVICE] [-e ENDPOINT] [-c CREDS]
[-v VERSION] [-p] [-w]
api
httpaws v0.0.2: A CLI HTTP client for AWS services with syntax highlighting
positional arguments:
api name of the API to call - e.g. "DescribeVpcs"
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-r REGION, --region REGION
AWS region. Overrides config/env - e.g. us-east-1
-s SERVICE, --service SERVICE
AWS service - e.g. ec2, s3, etc.
-e ENDPOINT, --endpoint ENDPOINT
override command's default URL with the given URL -
e.g. ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
-c CREDS, --creds CREDS
override AWS Access Key Id and AWS Secret Access Key -
i.e. <Access_Key>:<Secret_Key>
-v VERSION, --version VERSION
API version to use for the service
-p, --paginate paginate long output
-w, --wrap wrap long lines in paginated output (instead of chop)
See the AWS Documentation for API references for each service:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com
Authentication
The currently supported authentication scheme is provided by the
aws-requests-auth Python module. The two modes are are Automatic
and Manual. There is one flag that controls authentication:
Flag | Description |
---|
-c/--creds | Pass a <AWS_Access_Key_Id>:<AWS_Secret_Access_Key> pair as the argument |
Automatic auth
If the -c
flag is not provided, then httpAWS will attempt to automatically gather your AWS credentials using
botocore
.
$ httpaws DescribeVpcs
Manual auth
$ http -c <Access_Key>:<Secret_Key> DescribeVpcs
HTTP redirects
HTTP redirects are not followed and only the first esponse is shown.
Output options
At this time, httpAWS only outputs the final response and the whole response
message is printed (headers as well as the body).
Terminal output
httpAWS does several things by default in order to make its terminal output
easy to read.
Colors and formatting
Syntax highlighting is applied to HTTP headers bodies (where it makes
sense).
Also, the following formatting is applied:
- XML data is indented and unicode escapes are converted to the characters they represent.
Redirected output
By default, httpAWS sends all output to stdout
.
The reason is to make piping httpAWS's output to other programs work with no extra flags. Most of the time, only the raw
response body is of an interest when the output is redirected.
Force colorizing and formatting, and show both the request and the response in
less
pager:
$ httpaws -p DescribeVpcs
The -p
flag tells httpAWS to pipe the output to less
and to interpret color escape sequences included
httpAWS`s output.
Piping output
You can also redirect the response body to another program:
$ httpaws -s s3 List | grep "MagnumOpus.txt"
Responses
Responses are downloaded synchronously and printed when the download is complete which is convenient for formatting and
coloring moderate sized responses. However, if you want to download large files without using too much memory, this isn't
the tool you are looking for.
Sessions
At this time every request httpAWS makes is completely independent of any previous ones to the same host and httpAWS
does not support persistent sessions.
Config
httpAWS uses the same config files as used by the aws cli
.
Config file location
The default location of the configuration files are ~/.aws/config
and ~/.aws/credentials
.
Configurable options
The default AWS region is read from the config
file, while the default AWS access and secret keys are read from the
credentials
file.
Best practices
The -p
option for paginating long output is excellent when a human is reading this output, but
is not typically desirable during non-interactive invocations. You most likely do not want to use
use the -p
option when httpAWS is invoke from example form a cron job. Also, if you wnat to redirect or
pipe the output of httpAWS, the -p
flag should also be avoided.
Meta
User support
Please use the following support channels:
Related projects
Dependencies
Under the hood, httpAWS uses these amazing libraries:
- Requests
- Python HTTP library for humans
- aws-requests-auth
- AWS signature version 4 signing process for the Python requests module
- botocore
- The low-level, core functionality of boto 3 (the official AWS Python SDK)
- Pygments
- Python syntax highlighter
- Colorama
- Simple cross-platform colored terminal text in Python
- lxml
Alternatives
- HTTPie
- an awesome and much more feature rich HTTP CLI that isn't specific to AWS
- curl
- a "Swiss army knife" command line tool and library for transferring data with URLs
Warning
This tool is intended for development and educational purposes. It is NOT intended for robust and reliable
administration of AWS services. For interaction with production AWS services, it is highly recommended that you use
an officially supported tool specifically designed for that purpose such as any of the following:
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.md
Change log
See CHANGELOG.md
Licence
Apache 2.0: LICENSE
Authors
Todd Leonhardt created httpaws and
these fine people have contributed.