Announcing Httpbin.org

Development

Jun 12

The development of Requests, the Python HTTP Module for Humans, led to some annoying testing practices. Relying on random websites and services in order to test different capabilities of the HTTP client became annoying quickly.PostBin.org was perfect for testing POST request behavior, but is usless for other situations. I was hoping to extend its functionality to other request types, but it turns out that PostBin runs on the Google App Engine platform. No.

Thus, httpbin.org was born.

Example Endpoints

To get a feel for what HttpBin does, here are a few endpoint examples:

$ curl http://httpbin.org/ip :

{"origin": "::ffff:24.127.96.129"}

$ curl http://httpbin.org/user-agent :

{"user-agent": "curl/7.19.7 (universal-apple-darwin10.0) libcurl/7.19.7 OpenSSL/0.9.8l zlib/1.2.3"}

$ curl http://httpbin.org/get :

{"args": {},"headers": {"Accept": "*/*","Connection": "close","Content-Length": "","Content-Type": "","Host": "httpbin.org","User-Agent": "curl/7.19.7 (universal-apple-darwin10.0) libcurl/7.19.7 OpenSSL/0.9.8l zlib/1.2.3","X-Forwarded-For": "::ffff:24.127.96.129","X-Forwarded-Protocol": ""},"origin": "::ffff:24.127.96.129","url": "http://httpbin.org/get"}

$ curl -I http://httpbin.org/status/418 :

HTTP/1.1 418 I'M A TEAPOTServer: nginx/0.7.67Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2011 04:25:38 GMTConnection: closex-more-info: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324Content-Length: 135

Moving Forward

HttpBin will be packaged and released on PyPi soon, for local development use and requests-tests runs on ci.kennethreitz.com. I need to determine a portable pattern for this.

In the coming weeks, I'd like to add a few new new endpoints: /deflate, /basic-auth,&c. Contributions are welcome.

I'm considering adding optional request logging / history to the service, powered by Redis. A new /post request, for example, would be redirected to a new URL (e.g./post/c1548ed) that can be POSTed to repetitively. This will give HttpBin feature parity with postbin.