ask

CLI-Based HTTP Client in Go

Requirements

• A user should be able to give a URL for GET requests and a URL + body for POST requests.
• Users should be able to set up custom headers for every request
• The output from the API can be assumed to be JSON
• GET and POST requests
• For JSON requests, the request body is assumed to be JSON

Installation

1. git clone https://github.com/avinashb98/ask
2. cd ask
3. go mod tidy
4. go install

Usage

ask [METHOD] (url) [flags]

Get

ask http://httpbin.org/get
ask GET http://httpbin.org/get

// with headers
ask http://httpbin.org/get -H "accept:appplication/json x-user-id: 12345"

Post

ask POST http://httpbin.org/post

// with headers
ask POST http://httpbin.org/post -H "accept:appplication/json x-user-id: 12345"

// with body
ask POST http://httpbin.org/post -d "{\"key\": \"value\"}"

Output

ask http://httpbin.org/get

Response

Headers
--
--
--

Status: 200

{
  "args": {}, 
  "headers": {
    "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9", 
    "Accept-Encoding": "gzip, deflate", 
    "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.9,hi;q=0.8", 
    "Host": "httpbin.org", 
    "Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": "1", 
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.4896.127 Safari/537.36", 
    "X-Amzn-Trace-Id": "Root=1-626eac3d-58547338525f9bb0656d89f6"
  }, 
  "origin": "223.236.211.64", 
  "url": "http://httpbin.org/get"
}

Validation

• url is a required parameter
• if the method isn’t passed, it is by default a GET request
• method should be GET and POST - lowercase or uppercase
• url should have http or https as the protocol
• it should be valid url - verify it via regex
• header should not be malformed - “key:value key:value”
• body should be a valid json

LLD

type Request struct {
  URL *net.URL
  Headers map[string]string
  Body interface{}
  Timeout *time.Duration
}

func (r *Reqeust) Print() {}

type Response struct {
  Request Request
  StatusCode int
  TimeTaken float64
  Body interface{}
  Headers map[string]string
}

func (r *Response) Print() {}

func ExecuteRequest(r Request) (Response, error) {}

func main() {
  cmd.Execute()
}

// root cmd

func Execute() {
  validation()

  parsing()

  execution()
}

Folder Structure

cmd
    root.go     // root command
    input.go    // input data structure to store
    parser.go   // parses input into the input struct
lib
    request.go  // request structs and methods
    response.go // response structs and methods
    http.go     // make requests

main.go

Good To Have Features

• accept a verbosity flag -v -vv -vvv - levels of information printed
• accept body in formats other than JSON
• prompt to display the request information because making the request, controlled via a flag or based on methods : (POST, DELETE)
• accept the url without a protocol - e.g. httpbin.org/get, default would be http
• accept body from a file