CLI Operations

The biggest advantage of pythapi is the CLI interface. You can directly perform API call against your endpoint on the CLI. How awesome is that ;)

After you've installed pythapi through pip, pythapi is available over the CLI using:

$pythapi

Help

While you're using pythapi over the CLI, you can access the help menu during every command using the -h argument:

$pythapi -h
usage: pythapi <command> [<args>]

The most commonly used HTTP methods are:
get     HTTP GET Request
post    HTTP POST Request
put     HTTP PUT Request
delete  HTTP DELETE Request

positional arguments:
method      HTTP method to run

optional arguments:
-h, --help  show this help message and exit

Configuration

Before you can use the CLI, you need to create a configuration file. The configuration file contains very important parameters required for pythapi to work. Create a config file in your home directory under the folder .pythapi:

$vi ~/.pythapi/config

[default]
endpoint = localhost
base_url = /base/api/url

[auth]
authentication = True
auth_key = Basic abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Initially, you probably have to authenticate against your endpoint. Set the authentication to False when you launch a login POST request to get your authentication type and token. After you received your authentication type and code, enter them in the config file and set the authentication parameter back to True.

GET

The get is the most easiest HTTP method. Just use the get method and pass a path argument:

$pythapi get /users

POST

post requires a body to be send. You can't enter the body on the CLI. In some circumstances the body is very small but currenlty pythapi only supports the body from a json file:

$cat body.json
{
    "password": "password",
    "username": "username"
}

$pythapi post /login body.json

PUT

put acts the same like post:

$cat body.json
{
    "oldpassword": "password",
    "username": "username",
    "newpassword": "iamanewpassword"
}

$pythapi put /changepassword body.json

DELETE

And at last, the delete method is the same as the get method:

$pythapi delete /users/12