Httpie: Python API

Yes, it makes sense — I'll look into this. main() could return both exit status code and the final HTTP response. And maybe the parse args as well would be useful to return as well.

@eliangcs I'm doing a bigger refactoring and I'm thinking it would be good to have a stable and documented api.py module for use by third-party tools, so they don't have to touch the internals which have the tendency to change over time.

Could you maybe flash something out based on what http-prompt currently imports from HTTPie? Empty methods with args, and some brief docstrings with return values would be enough. A good starting point would be just listing all the imports http-prompt needs.

// cc @mblayman

@jkbrzt I did a grep over my codebase. These are what I found:

# http_prompt/cli.py
from httpie.plugins import FormatterPlugin  # just to avoid cyclic import, not really used
from httpie.output.formatters.colors import Solarized256Style  # to support solarized theme

# http_prompt/execution.py
from httpie.context import Environment  # to construct a custom Environment and pass it to httpie_main
from httpie.core import main as httpie_main  # to generate output and the response object

HTTPony touches very little of HTTPie's APIs. It's limited to:

from httpie.cli import parser
from httpie.context import Environment
from httpie.output import streams

The core of what is done is passing a requests.models.Request to streams.build_output_stream and calling streams.write_stream. All that happens in https://github.com/mblayman/httpony/blob/master/httpony/application.py.

Great, thanks. I'll go through it and to formalize those things where it makes sense. Then make some wrappers in httpie.api — or simply make those objects importable from the module to begin with.

This will make it explicit users can/might depend on it and provide some guarantee of stability compared to the internals. Changes to the httpie.api-exported functionality should also be covered in the change log.