cli-to-http

README

cli-to-http

FAIR WARNING: This tool was created to help a legacy application make various HTTP requests easily. If you think you need this tool, you're likely wrong. Widely used software like cURL and its successors are much better.

How-to use it

Please note that cli-to-http is only tested sending XML payloads but should work with anything as long as your payload does not start with lines that could be understood as directives. If that's a potential case, just add an empty line before your payload.

Writing everything into the request file

1. Put a file with all required data into request.txt in the same directory as your executable.
2. Make sure that the file is properly formatted as seen in the example request file.
3. Run the cli-to-http (or go run main.go)
4. Read the response from response.txt. An example is provided.

Options

cli-to-http comes with a number of options, please check them via executing your binary with --help argument. Among others you can provide the URL, the headers, the request method and the input and output files as arguments.

Using the options it is possible to only provide the payload in the input file and have the response payload in the output file.

Reading stdin and writing stdout

cli-to-http reads payload (and directives) from request.txt and writes response data to response.txt by default. However if you provde an empty string as input or output, stdin and stdout will be used, respectively.

Encrypt / Decrypt

Since version 0.3 cli-to-http can automatically encrypt and decrypt payloads, although algorithms supported are very limited.

Encode / Decode

Since version 0.3 cli-to-http can automatically encode and decode payloads, although at the moment only base64 is supported.

Order of execution

The application follows the following execution logic:

1. Parse command line arguments
2. Read request file (or standard input)
3. Encypt request payload (optional)
4. Encode request payload (optional)
5. Send payload (optional)
6. Decode response payload (optional)
7. Decrypt response payload (optional)
8. Write response file (or standard output)