Please

Please is a command line utility that makes it easy to integrate web APIs into your shell scripts.

It's called Please because the web works much better if you ask nicely.

It is comprised of three sub-commands:

• please request

  for communicating with web servers

• please respond

  acts as a one-shot web server - useful in testing you applications

• please identify

  given structured data on standard input, this will output the format used (e.g. "json", "yaml")

• please parse

  understands the data exchange formats of the web and can translate between them

Installing

Go users: Simply go get github.com/stilvoid/please.

Arch Linux: There's a please package in the AUR.

Anyone else: Grab the appropriate download from the latest release and put it somewhere in your path.

Examples

There are some examples in the examples folder.

Here are a few other ways that please might be useful in a bash script:

Getting the title of a web page

$ please get http://example.com/ | please parse html.head.title
Example Domain

Testing an api

$ echo '{"thing": 1}' | please post http://myapi.com
Success

Testing authentication

$ echo 'Authorization: Bearer mytoken' | please get -is http://myapi.com
401

Providing a single-use mock web server for testing client code

$ (echo Hello, world | please respond 200) & sleep 1s && curl -i http://localhost:8000
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 29 May 2015 22:23:30 GMT
Content-Length: 13
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Hello, world

Converting between structured data formats

$ echo '{"some": ["lovely", "json"], "now": "yaml"}' | please parse -o yaml
some:
- lovely
- json
now: yaml