Visit is a CLI tool by Spatie to see an HTTP response in a beautiful way. Think of it as cURL for humans:
🚀 I’ve just released Visit, a CLI tool for humans to make network requestshttps://t.co/LwqfyrDNOC
— Freek Van der Herten 🔠(@freekmurze) March 24, 2022
In this blog post I explain what this tool can do (and why I am not using curl for this):https://t.co/pWMfrH1ezf pic.twitter.com/Nv2yHHmkPL
To get started with visit, you can pass it a URL:
1visit laravel-news.com
If you've installed the recommended HTML syntax highlighting tool, you'll see something similar to the following:
Besides passing a URL, you can also do some pretty powerful stuff like filtering for both HTML and JSON responses:
1# Given the following HTML response, you can filter the results 2# <html> 3# <body> 4# <div>First div</div> 5# <p>First paragraph</p> 6# <p>Second paragraph</p> 7# </body> 8# </html> 9#10 11visit <your-url> --filter="p"12# Returns:13# <p>First paragraph</p>14# <p>Second paragraph</p>
Here's an example of a filtered JSON response:
1# Given the following JSON response, you can filter the results 2# { 3# "firstName": "firstValue", 4# "nested": { 5# "secondName": "secondValue" 6# } 7# } 8 9visit <your-url> --filter="nested.secondName"10# Returns `secondValue`
Along with the global composer CLI for Visit, Spatie has an accompanying spatie/laravel-visit package to visit any URI in a Laravel app quickly. You can even log in as a user when running the artisan visit
command:
1# Pass user.id2php artisan visit /api/user/me --user=13 4# or the --user flag5php artisan visit /api/user/me --user=john@example.com
Another cool trick is showing an exception stack trace instead of the rendered exception page:
1php artisan visit /page-with-exception --show-exception
We've only really scratched the surface of all the features possible with visit
. You can learn more about this package, get full installation instructions, and view the source code on GitHub.
Also, Freek Van der Herten wrote an in-depth blog post about this package that has more details: Introducing Visit: a CLI tool made for humans to make network requests.
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Full stack web developer. Author of Lumen Programming Guide and Docker for PHP Developers.