How to Install HTTPie in Windows 10

HTTPie where were you all my life? I just discovered this command line tool and wanted to give it a try right away. Unfortunately I was working on a Windows 10 machine and the project's homepage hints that it's a Mac exclusive. Luckily, the documentation contains installation instructions for Windows.

While you can just follow the instructions there, I'm going to document the steps anyway, for my own sake.

Install pip/Python and upgrade pip

Download the Windows x86-64 executable installer and run it.

python -m pip install --upgrade pip

Install HTTPie

pip install --upgrade pip setuptools pip install --upgrade httpie

That's it.

Basic usage

First of all, the command itself is http, NOT ~~httpie~~. I was wondering why it wasn't working after I installed it.

I was interested in testing a GET API endpoint in a local environment that had a bunch of query parameters appended at the end of the URL.

Turns out that HTTPie has a special syntax for query parameters, which can cast to specific types if the value is not a string. Here are a few, but the documentation has more.

Strings name==john or name=="john wick"

Numbers/Booleans year:=2015 or active:=true

Request headers key:value or key:"value with spaces"

Example

Here I'm making a GET request with some query parameters as well as a couple of headers.

GET example.com/api/quote?year=2015&name=john&birthday=06/21/2001&zipcode=60201

Headers:

Authorization:"Bearer tPOm3BXiYSv7fwnIN5dUCzpCy6sGH2Mdclj2BwBZvFw..."
accept:application/json

Command terminal (Windows/Mac/etc):

http GET example.com/api/quote year:=2015 name==john birthday==06/21/2001 zipcode==60201 Authorization:"Bearer tPOm3BXiYSv7fwnIN5dUCzpCy6sGH2Mdclj2BwBZvFwbDhLrAh0NmvtnyF4fdR3CbqAAdPQMPbSFYKXk" accept:"application/json"

The response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK 
Cache-Control: no-cache 
Connection: keep-alive 
Content-Type: application/json 
Date: Sat, 19 May 2019 19:11:45 GMT 
Server: nginx/1.15.0 
Set-Cookie: XSRF-TOKEN=eyJpdiI6ImlCK3M4bXI3NXdwUmw3ekpTcEs...; expires=Sat, 19-May-2019 21:11:45 GMT; Max-Age=7200; path=/ Set-Cookie: laravel_session=eyJpdiI6ImZYMm10djgwS29i...%3D; expires=Fri, 25-May-2019 07:11:45 GMT; Max-Age=216000; path=/; HttpOnly Transfer-Encoding: chunked

{ "data": { "somenumber": 4242.42 }, "message": "Here is your data", "success": true }

If you get the following error when running it in Git Bash:

http: error: Request body (from stdin or a file) and request data (key=value) cannot be mixed. Pass --ignore-stdin to let key/value take priority...

Then just run the same command but append the --ignore-stdin flag at the end.