= http_client
This is a very simple HTTP client. It only performs HTTP GET
operations, and does not follow HTTP redirects. Think of it as
a trivialized version of cURL. It is super simple, taking the
URL on the command line, and emitting the results to stdout.
For clarity, we are eliding TLS support.
It may not work on all systems, but it should work anywhere that
both the standard C library and nng itself are available.
We check for errors, but no effort is made to clean up resources,
since this program just exits. In longer running programs or libraries,
callers should take care to clean up things that they allocate.
Unfortunately many famous sites use redirects (usually to HTTPS
sites), so it's not a very useful replacement for cURL.
== Compiling
The following is an example typical of UNIX and similar systems like
Linux and macOS:
[source, bash]
----
% export CPPFLAGS="-I /usr/local/include"
% export LDFLAGS="-L /usr/local/lib -lnng"
% export CC="cc"
% ${CC} ${CPPFLAGS} http_client.c -o http_client ${LDFLAGS}
----
Alternatively, CMake can be used. Here's an example if you have
Ninja build handy (highly recommended):
[source, bash]
----
% mkdir build
% cd build
% cmake -G Ninja ..
% ninja
----
== Running
Make sure you specify the full URL (if the root page include
the simple "/". The URL parser does not add it for you automatically.)
[source, bash]
----
% ./http_client http://httpbin.org/ip
----
oxmox
7063e2102e