HARcURL

Welcome to the harcurl homepage.

In order to understand what harcurl is, there are some prerequisites you should know:

• HTTP is the way the Web works.
• HAR-1.2 is a specification of a JSON-based format for HTTP archives.
• JSON is a subset of JavaScript language syntax used for simple data exchange.
• jansson is a library for reading and writing JSON data.
• libcurl is a multiprotocol file transfer library (including HTTP).
• curl is a command-line tool that uses libcurl.
• glib is a library that provides the core application building blocks for GNOME.
• You don't need to know all of these, just HTTP and JSON should be enough.

All of these are used together in harcurl to make the tool easier to use. There are several goals of the harcurl project:

1. To evangelize the HAR format.
2. To make HAR more active than just an archival format (which IMHO is as passive as it gets).
3. To make HTTP transfers easier to understand (JSON helps by being able to see complex structures).
4. To make curl and libcurl easier to use.

   For example, instead of typing all of the arguments on the command-line, as some people do, you can capture a HAR request and HAR response with Chrome or Firefox and copy-and-paste the request to input into harcurl, and since it's the same format you don't have to edit much (except perhaps the Date header).

The harcurl tool accepts requests on stdin, and prints responses to stdout. The format of the request and response are both specified in the HAR-1.2 specification. Obviously, almost every property is optional on input, even though the HAR spec says it is required, since one of the jobs of harcurl is to fill in the rest of the data from the response. The only 2 properties that are required are method and url.

The recommended usage is to build a JSON file either by hand, or by generating one with your favorite programming language, then feed that to harcurl on stdin.

echo '
{
  "request" {
    "method": "GET",
    "url": "http://httpbin.org/get"
  }
}' | harcurl

The simplest way to use harcurl is to call it with the shell command:

harcurl < req.json > resp.json