HTTParty Goes Commando

Hot of the press is a new feature for HTTParty, everyone’s favorite way of consuming sane web services. Thanks to Alex Vollmer, the party has been extended to your terminal with a sexy command line interface!

The CLI is available in 0.2.5, which should be on GitHub and RubyForge by the time you read this. If you like the addition, be sure to send Alex (@alexvollmer) a tweet to let him know and thank him. Enough with the gratitude, give me some examples you say!

Installation

# GitHub
$ sudo gem install jnunemaker-httparty --source http://gems.github.com

# RubyForge
$ sudo gem install httparty

Examples

I use Twitter for a lot of examples, so how about we start with the Twitter public timeline.

$ httparty http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.json
[{"user"=>
   {"name"=>"sfwineboy",
    "url"=>"http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1401240105",
    "id"=>"15651761",
    "description"=>"Chill - Axin",
    "protected"=>false,
    "screen_name"=>"sfwineboy",
    "followers_count"=>8,
    "location"=>"Los Angeles, CA",
    "profile_image_url"=>
     "http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/57533829/a_281078039762fd87b263a939b652626f_normal.jpg"},
  "favorited"=>false,
  "truncated"=>false,
  "text"=>"Chillin in LA in Mar Vista http://loopt.us/VVQu2Q",
  "id"=>"1096656558",
  "in_reply_to_status_id"=>nil,
  "in_reply_to_user_id"=>nil,
  "source"=>"<a href=\"https://loopt.com\">Loopt</a>",
  "created_at"=>"Mon Jan 05 07:10:43 +0000 2009"},
  ...
}]

By default, the command line interface to HTTParty gives you a ruby pretty printed object. It doesn’t stop there though. If you want, you can format the output using the JSON gem’s pretty_generate version of JSON or REXML’s attempt at pretty indented xml.

$ httparty -f json http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.json
[
  {
    "user": {
      "name": "Katrin Verclas",
      "url": "http:\/\/www.mobileactive.org",
      "id": "3125721",
      "description": "chica. curious.",
      "protected": false,
      "screen_name": "Katrinskaya",
      "followers_count": 935,
      "location": "",
      "profile_image_url": "http:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/twitter_production\/profile_images\/65202240\/Photo_95_normal.jpg"
    },
    "favorited": false,
    "truncated": false,
    "text": "It is 2 am and insomnia girl is trying hard not to get completely irritated at this shit. Drugs, baby, drugs.",
    "id": "1096661586",
    "in_reply_to_status_id": null,
    "in_reply_to_user_id": null,
    "source": "<a href=\"http:\/\/www.naan.net\/trac\/wiki\/TwitterFon\">TwitterFon<\/a>",
    "created_at": "Mon Jan 05 07:15:38 +0000 2009"
  },
  ...
 }
]

$ httparty -f xml "http://whoismyrepresentative.com/whoismyrep.php?zip=46544&output=xml"
<result n='1'>
  <rep name='Joe Donnelly' district='2' office='1218 Longworth' phone='(202) 225-3915' link='http://donnelly.house.gov/' state='IN'/>
</result>

You can also use different request methods, such as post and set headers and junk like that. See the help for more information.

$ httparty -h
USAGE: /opt/local/bin/httparty [options] [url]
    -f, --format [FORMAT]            Body format: plain, json or xml
    -r, --ruby                       Dump output in Ruby pretty-print format
    -a, --action [ACTION]            HTTP action: get (default), post, put or delete
    -d, --data [BODY]                Data to put in request body (prefix with '@' for file)
    -H, --header [NAME=VALUE]        Additional HTTP headers in NAME=VALUE form
    -v, --verbose                    If set, print verbose output
    -h, --help                       Show help documentation

I think this addition is pretty hot and I’m excited to actually need to try it out. This is, I’m sure, just the first pass of what will be more updates to the CLI of HTTParty, but I can see this completely replacing curl and your browser for testing API’s that you are building (or wrapping). Very cool stuff and much thanks to Alex.