xh — Friendly and Fast HTTPie-Compatible HTTP Client in Rust

Introduction

xh gives you HTTPie's human-friendly syntax at Rust-level speed and portability. It's a single binary you can drop into Alpine containers and CI runners without pulling in Python. For teams that love HTTPie's key=value body shorthand and colorized JSON but resent the cold-start cost, xh is a near drop-in replacement.

What xh Does

• Performs HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and HTTPS requests from the command line.
• Offers HTTPie-style shorthand for JSON (name=value), strings (::), raw JSON (:=), forms (--form), files (@path), and headers (Key:value).
• Pretty-prints JSON and colorizes request/response.
• Supports sessions, downloads, resumable transfers, multipart uploads.
• Ships as a single ~5MB static binary.

Architecture Overview

xh is built on reqwest (hyper + rustls) and clap. A request parser translates CLI tokens into typed body/header/query segments, then hyper executes the request. Output is pretty-printed by serde_json and syntect. HTTP/2 and TLS come from rustls with no OpenSSL dependency.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Install via brew install xh, cargo install xh, or binary release.
• Sessions stored as JSON in ~/.config/xh/sessions/.
• XH_CONFIG_DIR overrides location.
• Works offline: --offline prints the request without sending.
• Supports .netrc, client certs, proxies, and custom CA bundles.

Key Features

• HTTPie-compatible syntax — muscle memory transfers.
• ~3–6× faster cold start than HTTPie (no Python interpreter).
• Single-binary distribution, ideal for containers and CI.
• HTTP/2, HSTS, and rustls by default.
• Session support and --download with resume.

Comparison with Similar Tools

• HTTPie (Python) — same UX; heavier install, slower startup.
• curl — ubiquitous but verbose; no JSON shorthand.
• curlie — curl wrapper in Go with HTTPie syntax; fewer features than xh.
• Hurl — file-based runner for test suites; different use case.
• Bruno/Postman — GUI and collections; xh is CLI-only.

FAQ

Q: Is xh a drop-in replacement for HTTPie? A: 95% — most recipes work unchanged; a few niche flags differ.

Q: Does it support HTTP/3? A: Experimental via --http3 when built with the http3 feature.

Q: How do I pin TLS versions? A: --tls 1.3 forces TLS 1.3.

Q: Can I import an HTTPie session? A: Copy the JSON into ~/.config/xh/sessions/<host>/<name>.json.

Sources

• https://github.com/ducaale/xh
• https://crates.io/crates/xh