Manual

Name

hurl - run and test HTTP requests.

Synopsis

hurl [options] [FILE...]

Description

Hurl is a command line tool that runs HTTP requests defined in a simple plain text format.

It can chain requests, capture values and evaluate queries on headers and body response. Hurl is very versatile, it can be used for fetching data and testing HTTP sessions: HTML content, REST / SOAP / GraphQL APIs, or any other XML / JSON based APIs.

$ hurl session.hurl

If no input files are specified, input is read from stdin.

$ echo GET http://httpbin.org/get | hurl
    {
      "args": {},
      "headers": {
        "Accept": "*/*",
        "Accept-Encoding": "gzip",
        "Content-Length": "0",
        "Host": "httpbin.org",
        "User-Agent": "hurl/0.99.10",
        "X-Amzn-Trace-Id": "Root=1-5eedf4c7-520814d64e2f9249ea44e0"
      },
      "origin": "1.2.3.4",
      "url": "http://httpbin.org/get"
    }

Hurl can take files as input, or directories. In the latter case, Hurl will search files with .hurl extension recursively.

Output goes to stdout by default. To have output go to a file, use the -o, --output option:

$ hurl -o output input.hurl

By default, Hurl executes all HTTP requests and outputs the response body of the last HTTP call.

To have a test oriented output, you can use --test option:

$ hurl --test *.hurl

Hurl File Format

The Hurl file format is fully documented in https://hurl.dev/docs/hurl-file.html

It consists of one or several HTTP requests

GET http://example.org/endpoint1
GET http://example.org/endpoint2

Capturing values

A value from an HTTP response can be-reused for successive HTTP requests.

A typical example occurs with CSRF tokens.

GET https://example.org
HTTP 200
# Capture the CSRF token value from html body.
[Captures]
csrf_token: xpath "normalize-space(//meta[@name='_csrf_token']/@content)"

# Do the login !
POST https://example.org/login?user=toto&password=1234
X-CSRF-TOKEN: {{csrf_token}}

More information on captures can be found here https://hurl.dev/docs/capturing-response.html

Asserts

The HTTP response defined in the Hurl file are used to make asserts. Responses are optional.

At the minimum, response includes assert on the HTTP status code.

GET http://example.org
HTTP 301

It can also include asserts on the response headers

GET http://example.org
HTTP 301
Location: http://www.example.org

Explicit asserts can be included by combining a query and a predicate

GET http://example.org
HTTP 301
[Asserts]
xpath "string(//title)" == "301 Moved"

With the addition of asserts, Hurl can be used as a testing tool to run scenarios.

More information on asserts can be found here https://hurl.dev/docs/asserting-response.html

Options

Options that exist in curl have exactly the same semantics.

Options specified on the command line are defined for every Hurl file’s entry, except if they are tagged as cli-only (can not be defined in the Hurl request [Options] entry)

For instance:

$ hurl --location foo.hurl

will follow redirection for each entry in foo.hurl. You can also define an option only for a particular entry with an [Options] section. For instance, this Hurl file:

GET https://example.org
HTTP 301

GET https://example.org
[Options]
location: true
HTTP 200

will follow a redirection only for the second entry.

Environment

Environment variables can only be specified in lowercase.

Using an environment variable to set the proxy has the same effect as using the -x, --proxy option.

Exit Codes

WWW

https://hurl.dev

See Also

curl(1) hurlfmt(1)