# Announcing Httpbin.org
*January 2011*

The development of [Requests](https://python-requests.org/), the Python HTTP Module for Humans, led to some annoying testing practices. Relying on random websites and services in order to test different capabilities of the HTTP client became annoying quickly. [PostBin.org](http://postbin.org/) was perfect for testing POST request behavior, but is useless for other situations. I was hoping to extend its functionality to other request types, but it turns out that PostBin runs on the Google App Engine platform. No.

Thus, [httpbin.org](http://httpbin.org/) was born.

## Example Endpoints

To get a feel for what **HttpBin** does, here are a few endpoint examples:

`$ curl http://httpbin.org/ip`:

```json
{"origin": "::ffff:24.127.96.129"}
```

`$ curl http://httpbin.org/user-agent`:

```json
{"user-agent": "curl/7.19.7 (universal-apple-darwin10.0) libcurl/7.19.7 OpenSSL/0.9.8l zlib/1.2.3"}
```

`$ curl http://httpbin.org/get`:

```json
{"args": {},"headers": {"Accept": "*/*","Connection": "close","Content-Length": "","Content-Type": "","Host": "httpbin.org","User-Agent": "curl/7.19.7 (universal-apple-darwin10.0) libcurl/7.19.7 OpenSSL/0.9.8l zlib/1.2.3","X-Forwarded-For": "::ffff:24.127.96.129","X-Forwarded-Protocol": ""},"origin": "::ffff:24.127.96.129","url": "http://httpbin.org/get"}
```

`$ curl -I http://httpbin.org/status/418`:

```
HTTP/1.1 418 I'M A TEAPOT
Server: nginx/0.7.67
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2011 04:25:38 GMT
Connection: close
x-more-info: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324
Content-Length: 135
```

## Moving Forward

**HttpBin** will be packaged and released on PyPi soon, for local development use and requests-tests runs on [ci.kennethreitz.com](http://ci.kennethreitz.com/). I need to determine a portable pattern for this.

In the coming weeks, I'd like to add a few new endpoints: `/deflate`, `/basic-auth`, etc. Contributions are welcome.

I'm considering adding optional request logging / history to the service, powered by Redis. A new `/post` request, for example, would be redirected to a new URL (e.g. `/post/c1548ed`) that can be POSTed to repetitively. This will give **HttpBin** feature parity with postbin.

## Source Code

**HttpBin** is open source (ISC Licensed), powered by [Flask](http://flask.pocoo.org/), [Werkzeug](http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/), and good intentions.

* [Code on GitHub](https://github.com/kennethreitz/httpbin)
* [httpbin.org](http://httpbin.org/)