Say hello to Hit 👋

Introducing Hit, a tool to make and manage HTTP requests.

I’m stoked to announce the launch of Hit - a command line tool to manage HTTP requests. Hit takes a command-line first approach to managing HTTP requests, executing them and sharing them with others.

Demo-time #

Nothing beats a demo!

Why build a new tool? #

I spend the majority of my time on the terminal and write backend software. To execute requests, I usually resort to curl or similar programs, which evolve into scripts - shell or python. Such scripts typically get out of hand as I’m looking for something quick that solves the problem at hand and don’t have the time to maintain and improve them. Another problem is that when I want to find a curl that I executed some time ago, doing a history | grep curl ... yields nothing. Either I can’t remember the command I executed, or it is far too cumbersome to search the history. I need a tool that is programmable, fast and works over long-periods of development time as the number and complexity of requests scales well beyond the limits of my ability to remember all the knobs.

The same problem becomes much more complicatd with team projects. One engineer starts with a script, these get out of hand as everyone wants to customize some different parts of the request. Again it is rare for these scripts to receive the attention and care that they need. These scripts also get peppered with choices and styles of other engineers - which has its up and down. As new engineers onboard, they have to spend time looking through the scripts or code to figure out how to execute a specific request that they need to finish the task at hand - such as debugging a specific endpoint or adding a feature to a set of endpoints.

HTTP is the foundation of most modern APIs - from banking to shipping and API-based HTTP requests make over 80% of the web traffic. Yet, I find that the tooling to manage HTTP requests is poor and can be improved significantly. I believe that the simplicity of the HTTP protocol is a big reason for its success. We need a tool that is equally simple to make it more manageable as the building blocks on top of HTTP become more and more complex.

I should acknowledge here that there are a lot of GUI-based apps in the market that try to solve problem in this area, and they do an amazing job. GUIs are great but I need something that focuses on the terminal. hit is all about a superior CLI experience. There is nothing wrong with GUI-based apps - they don’t work for me as I prefer sticking to the terminal for most of my work.

hit’s goal is to make executing requests easy, keep track of the executed requests, their responses and when the need arises, share the requests with others - all from the terminal.

Progress so far #

What is being launching today is a very rough and an early MVP with a lot of rough edges. One can write HTTP requests using text files and then execute those requests. In terms of features, only the most basic features are present at the moment. I expect most users to run into issues and some bugs could be surprisingly embarrassing. The goal is to get some early feedback from the hit’s early adopters.

Please give hit a try using the quick-start-guide. If you run into issues or have any feedback, please open a Github issue, I would love to hear whatever you have to say.

Path forward #

While I’m still figuring out details, I’ve an exciting roadmap planned for hit. Some planned features include advanced search of historical executions, browsing of requests, sharing features, and most importantly compatibility with existing popular command line tools like curl.

If you have ideas or feedback, please reach out!

If you like the vision, please star hit’s Github repository [hbagdi/hit](https://github.com/hbagdi/hit, follow @hitcmd and share this blog with someone who may be facing a similar problem

Stay tuned for features and a more complete program. Thank you and keep it simple!