restclient.el

This is a tool to manually explore and test HTTP REST webservices. Runs queries from a plain-text query sheet, displays results as a pretty-printed XML, JSON and even images.

Usage

Deploy restclient.el into your site-lisp as usual, (require 'restclient) and prepare a text file with queries.

restclient-mode is a major mode which does a bit of highlighting and supports a few additional keypresses:

• C-c C-c: runs the query under the cursor, tries to pretty-print the response (if possible)
• C-c C-r: same, but doesn't do anything with the response, just shows the buffer

Query file example:

# -*- restclient -*-
#
# Gets user timeline, formats JSON, shows response status and headers underneath
#
#
GET http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=twitterapi&count=2
#
# XML is supported - highlight, pretty-print
#
GET http://www.redmine.org/issues.xml?limit=10

#
# It can even show an image!
#
GET http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Wikipedia-logo.png
#
# A bit of json GET, you can pass headers too
#
GET http://jira.atlassian.com/rest/api/latest/issue/JRA-9
User-Agent: Emacs24
Accept-Encoding: application/xml

#
# Post works too, entity just goes after an empty line. Same is for PUT.
#
POST https://jira.atlassian.com/rest/api/2/search
Content-Type: application/json

{
	"jql": "project = HSP",
	"startAt": 0,
	"maxResults": 15,
	"fields": [
		"summary",
		"status",
		"assignee"
	]
}
#
# And delete, will return not-found error...
#
DELETE https://jira.atlassian.com/rest/api/2/version/20

Lines starting with # are considered comments AND also act as separators.

HTTPS and image display requires additional dll's on windows (libtls, libpng, libjpeg etc), which are not in the emacs distribution.

Known issues

• Comment lines # act as end of enitity. Yes, that means you can't post shell script or anything with hashes as PUT/POST entity. I'm fine with this right now, but may use more unique separator in future.
• I'm not sure if it handles different encodings, I suspect it won't play well with anything non-ascii. I'm yet to figure it out.

License

Public domain, do whatever you want (apart from json-reformat.el thing, which is not mine)

Author

Pavel Kurnosov [email protected]