The following requirements are mandatory:

• A recent C++ compiler which fully supports C++11
• CMake

Note that this program depends on some libraries. CMake first download those libraries and then it builds the program.

You can use the graphical interface of CMake (cmake-gui) to generate a makefile. If you prefer command line interface, first go to the project path and then execute the following commands:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make

For more information about using CMake check out this link.

You can use the graphical interface of CMake to generate a project (for example Visual Studio project). If you prefer command line interface, first go to the project path and then execute the following commands:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

Then you can open the generated project with your favorite IDE (e.g. Visual Studio). For more information about using CMake check out this link.

You can see various examples in the following line. For more information about available arguments run ./httpc --help.

$ ./httpc -v get "http://httpbin.org/get?course=networking&assignment=1"
$ ./httpc -v post "http://httpbin.org/post" -h "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"Assignment": 1}'
$ ./httpc -v post "http://httpbin.org/post" -h "Content-Type: application/json" -f sample_files/post_data_1.txt
$ ./httpc -v post "http://httpbin.org/post" -h "Content-Type: application/json" -f sample_files/post_data_2.txt
$ ./httpc -v post "http://httpbin.org/post" -h "Content-Type: application/json" -h "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0" -h "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.7,fa;q=0.3" -f sample_files/post_data_2.txt
$ ./httpc -v post "http://httpbin.org/post" -h "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" -f sample_files/post_data_3.txt

You can find some sample files for --file option in sample_files directory.

I implemented both absolute and relative redirection.

$ ./httpc -v --redirect get "http://httpbin.org/redirect-to?url=http://example.com"
$ ./httpc -v --redirect  get "http://httpbin.org/redirect/6"
$ ./httpc -v --redirect --max-redirection=3 get "http://httpbin.org/redirect/6"
$ ./httpc -v --redirect  get "http://httpbin.org/relative-redirect/6"
$ ./httpc -v --redirect  get "http://httpbin.org/absolute-redirect/6"

We can store both text and binary files using -o flag.

$ ./httpc -v  get "http://httpbin.org/image/png" -o image.png
$ ./httpc -v get "http://download.blender.org/peach/bigbuckbunny_movies/big_buck_bunny_480p_surround-fix.avi" -o big_buck_bunny.avi

Using --header-file, you can associate the content of a file as headers for HTTP request. Since there should be an empty line between header request and the body request in POST, it can be tricky. In my implementation user can put empty lines at the end of fine but the program eliminate them. Here is an example:

$ ./httpc -v post "http://httpbin.org/post" --header-file sample_files/header_data_1.txt -f sample_files/post_data_3.txt

I've used the following external libraries. You don't need to download them. It's the job of CMake:

• Asio for cross-platform socket programming
• cxxopts for command line interface
• LUrlParser for parsing URLs