Hyper Command Line Interface

For testing purposes, hyper provides a command-line tool that can make HTTP/2 requests directly from the CLI. This is useful for debugging purposes, and to avoid having to use the Python interactive interpreter to execute basic queries.

The usage is:

hyper [-h] [--version] [--debug] [METHOD] URL [REQUEST_ITEM [REQUEST_ITEM ...]]

For example:

$ hyper GET https://http2bin.org/get
{'args': {},
 'headers': {'Connection': 'close', 'Host': 'http2bin.org', 'Via': '2.0 nghttpx'},
 'origin': '81.129.184.72',
 'url': 'https://http2bin.org/get'}

This allows making basic queries to confirm that hyper is functioning correctly, or to perform very basic interop testing with other services.

Sending Data

The hyper tool has a limited ability to send certain kinds of data. You can add extra headers by passing them as colon-separated data:

$ hyper GET https://http2bin.org/get User-Agent:hyper/0.2.0 X-Totally-Real-Header:someval
{'args': {},
 'headers': {'Connection': 'close',
             'Host': 'http2bin.org',
             'User-Agent': 'hyper/0.2.0',
             'Via': '2.0 nghttpx',
             'X-Totally-Real-Header': 'someval'},
 'origin': '81.129.184.72',
 'url': 'https://http2bin.org/get'}

You can add query-string parameters:

$ hyper GET https://http2bin.org/get search==hyper
{'args': {'search': 'hyper'},
 'headers': {'Connection': 'close', 'Host': 'http2bin.org', 'Via': '2.0 nghttpx'},
 'origin': '81.129.184.72',
 'url': 'https://http2bin.org/get?search=hyper'}

And you can upload JSON objects:

$ hyper POST https://http2bin.org/post name=Hyper language=Python description='CLI HTTP client'
{'args': {},
 'data': '{"name": "Hyper", "description": "CLI HTTP client", "language": '
         '"Python"}',
 'files': {},
 'form': {},
 'headers': {'Connection': 'close',
             'Content-Length': '73',
             'Content-Type': 'application/json; charset=utf-8',
             'Host': 'http2bin.org',
             'Via': '2.0 nghttpx'},
 'json': {'description': 'CLI HTTP client',
          'language': 'Python',
          'name': 'Hyper'},
 'origin': '81.129.184.72',
 'url': 'https://http2bin.org/post'}

Debugging and Detail

For more detail, passing the --debug flag will enable hyper‘s DEBUG-level logging. This provides a lot of low-level detail about exactly what hyper is doing, including sent and received frames and HPACK state.

Notes

The hyper command-line tool is not intended to be a fully functional HTTP CLI tool: for that, we recommend using HTTPie, which uses hyper for its HTTP/2 support.