Quick Start

A summary of how to use hit.

Install hit #

macOS #

brew install hbagdi/tap/hit

Linux #

Grab the binary from the release page and install:

curl -sL https://github.com/hbagdi/hit/releases/download/v0.2.0/hit_0.2.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz -o hit.tar.gz
tar -xf hit.tar.gz -C /tmp
sudo cp /tmp/hit /usr/local/bin/

Verify hit is installed correctly #

hit version

It should output the version of hit that is currently installed on your system.

Create your first hit file #

Create a hit file using the following command:

echo '
@_global
base_url=https://httpbin.org
version=1


@c0
GET
/headers
foo: bar
baz: qux
' > quick-start.hit

The above file defines a couple of things:

• @_global section defines hit settings that apply to all files in the current directory. Two global properties are defined, base_url and version. All requests are constructed on top of the base_url. version is the version of the hit file - the only valid version is 1.
• @c0 section defines an HTTP request with an ID of r0. The line after the ID, in this case ‘GET’ defines the HTTP method used for the request. Next line is the HTTP request line, popularly known as the HTTP path of the request. Lines after the path are have key-value pairs defining HTTP headers for the request.

With that bit of background, go ahead and hit your first HTTP request:

hit @c0

The above command instructs hit to load all files in the present working directory and initiate the c0 request. The request and response are printed on the screen. It should look something like:

GET /headers HTTP/1.1
Host: httpbin.org
User-Agent: Go-http-client/1.1
foo-header: bar
Accept-Encoding: gzip


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 216
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2022 04:18:33 GMT
Server: gunicorn/19.9.0

{
  "headers": {
    "Accept-Encoding": "gzip",
    "Foo-Header": "bar",
    "Host": "httpbin.org",
    "User-Agent": "Go-http-client/1.1",
    "X-Amzn-Trace-Id": "Root=1-6243da19-708fb5131135b2582a339aaa"
  }
}

Congratulations! You hit your first HTTP request successfully.

Enable auto-completion #

Let’s first enable shell auto-completion to save some keystrokes.

source <(hit completion)

You can type hit and press the TAB key to see suggestions. In the above file, there is only request so your shell will automatically complete the prompt to hit @c0.

An advanced example - Nodes API #

Next, let’s grab a hit file that does more than a GET request.

curl --silent https://hit.yolo42.com/quick-start.hit --output quick-start.hit

This API helps build a tree-based data-structure. Let’s go ahead and create the root node of the tree:

hit @gen-root-node

Next, we are going to create a child node under the root node:

hit @create-node "buy-groceries" @gen-root-node.id

In the above command, the parameter @gen-root-node.id references the id field from the latest response body of the @gen-root-node request.

Let’s create another node under the node that we just created.

hit @create-node "tomatoes" @create-node.id

Let’s take a look at tour grocery list.

hit @get-node @create-node.parent_id

Let’s go ahead and add a couple of items.

hit @create-node "potatoes" @get-node.id
hit @create-node "milk" @get-node.id

Let’s grab our grocery list now.

hit @get-node @get-node.id

Let’s delete an item, let’s delete the first item in the grocery list.

hit @delete-node @get-node.children.0.id

Grab the grocery list again

hit @get-node @get-node.id

Hope you get the idea! hit hides away internal details of the API and provides a simple and intuitive interface to exectue requests defined as templates.