Allow specifying default hostnames (instead of localhost)

[hmeine]

This seems to be related to #215 and #180, but is not a pure duplicate: I would like to be able to create an alias or shell function for accessing a certain rest API requiring authentication. I started with

function girder {
    https --session=~/.girder_session.json girder.host.local.lan/api/v1/$1 ${@:2}
}

but my main problem is that I cannot change the HTTP method (e.g. to PUT or PATCH) this way. I would like to be able to have a different way of specifying the default host, so that I do not have to add a commandline parsing around httpie. And I do have some hope, since httpie already supports a default hostname, only that it's hardcoded to be localhost.

I see two potential solutions:

1. #215 contains a small change introducing an environment variable for the default host, which would solve my issue.
2. Another idea I had (more in the line of #180) would be to make the default hostname an optional part of the sessions. Maybe that could even be made to work with named sessions, by looking into a "default" host directory: ~/.httpie/sessions/default/<name>.json

With both solutions, the above shell function could be turned into a simple alias passing the desired --session parameter.

[vergenzt]

FYI, I've worked around this for local scripting use by defining a function (in Fish, as that's the shell I use). I'm still working out the kinks, but here's the basic structure:

function http
  argparse --ignore-unknown 'base-url=' -- $argv # extract --base-url if specified as option
  set opts (string match -rae  '^-' -- $argv) # extract args that start with '-' into $opts
  set rest (string match -raev '^-' -- $argv) # extract args that do not start with '-' into $rest
  command http $opts (string join $flag_base_url $rest[1]) $rest[2..-1] # put $opts before $rest
end

Note that this has meant that options that take an argument have to be joined with that argument with an equals sign instead of a space. So e.g. http --base-url=example.com --auth $USER:$PASS /test will fail because it'll translate to http --auth example.com/test $USER:$PASS.

Instead, with this workaround, you've gotta do either http --base-url=example.com --auth=$USER:$PASS /test with translates to http --auth=$USER:$PASS example.com/test.

[vergenzt]

Hmm, I just realized as I was posting https://github.com/httpie/httpie/issues/838#issuecomment-1110055759 that this doesn't work when an http verb (get, post, put, etc.) is explicitly passed as the first argument, as this function statically prepends $flag_base_url to the first non-option argument.

I think what I'll likely do is statically check if $rest[1] is in the list of expected http verbs → prepend $flag_base_url to $rest[2] if so, else prepend to $rest[1].

[MoyeMoixa]

This has been open for a while. Will it be released soon?

[vergenzt]

Draft PR remains open: https://github.com/httpie/cli/pull/1377

I haven't had time nor motivation to push it to completion.

However AFAIK it has not received any official confirmation that it would be accepted if it's cleaned up. So if a maintainer would be willing to confirm they'd be comfortable with this change before anybody puts more effort in that would be nice!