Download mode

HTTPie features a download mode in which it acts similarly to wget.

When enabled using the —download, -d flag, response headers are printed tothe terminal (stderr), and a progress bar is shown while the response bodyis being saved to a file.

  1. $ http --download https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie/archive/master.tar.gz
  1. HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  2. Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=httpie-master.tar.gz
  3. Content-Length: 257336
  4. Content-Type: application/x-gzip
  5.  
  6. Downloading 251.30 kB to "httpie-master.tar.gz"
  7. Done. 251.30 kB in 2.73862s (91.76 kB/s)

Downloaded filename

There are three mutually exclusive ways through which HTTPie determinesthe output filename (with decreasing priority):

  • You can explicitly provide it via —output, -o.The file gets overwritten if it already exists(or appended to with —continue, -c).
  • The server may specify the filename in the optional Content-Dispositionresponse header. Any leading dots are stripped from a server-provided filename.
  • The last resort HTTPie uses is to generate the filename from a combinationof the request URL and the response Content-Type.The initial URL is always used as the basis forthe generated filename — even if there has been one or more redirects.To prevent data loss by overwriting, HTTPie adds a unique numerical suffix to thefilename when necessary (unless specified with —output, -o).

Piping while downloading

You can also redirect the response body to another program while the responseheaders and progress are still shown in the terminal:

  1. $ http -d https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie/archive/master.tar.gz |  tar zxf -

Resuming downloads

If —output, -o is specified, you can resume a partial download using the—continue, -c option. This only works with servers that supportRange requests and 206 Partial Content responses. If the server doesn'tsupport that, the whole file will simply be downloaded:

  1. $ http -dco file.zip example.org/file

Other notes

  • The —download option only changes how the response body is treated.
  • You can still set custom headers, use sessions, —verbose, -v, etc.
  • —download always implies —follow (redirects are followed).
  • HTTPie exits with status code 1 (error) if the body hasn't been fullydownloaded.
  • Accept-Encoding cannot be set with —download.