RESTMan is a program for sending web requests using a terminal user interface or TUI.

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Right now, Windows is not supported directly due to limitations of the Brick library used to generate the TUI. You can however, use Windows to build and execute RESTMan through WSL2 and a Debian distribution. See details below.

Usage

% stack exec restman -- --help
RESTman, an HTTP(S) application

Usage: restman [--help] [-m|--method METHOD] 
                   [--no-default-headers | --default-headers] 
                   [-h|--custom-header NAME_VALUE] 
                   [--payload PAYLOAD | --payload-file PATHNAME]
  A TUI application for interactively using the full range of HTTP(S) directly

Available options:
  --help                   Show command-line help and abort normal operation.
  -m,--method METHOD       HTTP(S) Method (or "Verb") (default: "GET")
  --no-default-headers     Send ONLY the custom headers specified.
  --default-headers        Send custom headers after default headers. This is
                           the default behavior.
  -h,--custom-header NAME_VALUE
                           Add a custom header, argument is name:value (colon
                           separates name from value).
  --payload PAYLOAD        Specify (in UTF-8) payload directly on command-line
  --payload-file PATHNAME  Load payload from file on startup

https://gitlab.com/krakrjak/restman

Building

For those already familiar with Haskell and the Stack, you can get up and running quickly with the usual recipie of stack setup followed by stack build. As usual, stack setup only needs to be run once.

Building on Debian (WSL2 Tested)

Install and configure your favorite shell, you are going to spend a lot of time in it. :)

Once you are comfortable install the package haskell-stack, libtinfo-dev, and libz1g-dev using apt: apt install haskell-stack libtinfo-dev libz1g-dev

You will need to upgrade the Debian provided stack using stack upgrade. If needed it will prompt you for sudo access. Once your stack is up-to-date you need a Haskell compiler. Use stack setup to determine, fetch, and configure a compiler for your environment. You can check your installation using stack ghci to enter the GHC REPL.

Now you are ready to build RESTMan and all of its dependencies. stack build

Building on M1 Mac

Install ghcup, then brew install llvm. Then you will need the following setup in your environment:

export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/llvm@13/bin:$PATH"
export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/opt/llvm@13/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/opt/llvm@13/include"

Then you can successfully use stack to build the program. You will need some extra flags to make it all work. Here's what is reported to work currently: stack --arch aarch64 --system-ghc build.

Running and Testing

Once you have restman-exe built you can use stack to execute it with stack exec restman-exe. If you want to pass options to the program you can use the form stack exec restman-exe -- OPTIONS FOR RESTMAN BINARY. You can also install the binary to ~/.local with stack install. If you add ~/.local/bin to your PATH you can run the program without the aid of the stack executable.