icdiff is also nice to have a side-by-side colored diff (https://github.com/jeffkaufman/icdiff). And of course, you could use meld, vimdiff, kompare etc. with the same bash anonymous pipes indirection.
Httpdiff is a really good tool and way more powerful than mine.
I've used it multiple times and wanted to try making something that focused more on the request body (which in Httpdiff are saved to temporary files) and that was also a bit more visual than a CLI.
1) What's the diff logic? At first glance, it looks like JSON is reformatted (maybe canonicalized in some way) and then a line-by-line diff is applied. Is there more to it? Since the tool seems JSON-aware, I was surprised to see an added trailing comma up as a difference.
2) Do you have plans to expand the kind of HTTP requests users can make? It would be nice to use different verbs, headers, and request bodies. Runscope has a similar tool[0] built in that I believe (haven't tried it yet) allows a bit more flexibility, but it would be nice to have a standalone tool available.
1) the diff is really simple, line by line and text based. I'm
just using this really awesome library to do it: https://github.com/kpdecker/jsdiff The JSON is just being pretty printed to be able to do a text diff in a meaningful way.
2) Yes, I do, and thanks for the suggestions! But I just wanted to go with the minimal version first and see if people found it useful.
I didn't know about Runscope's diffing feature. Btw, I'm using a HTTPBin for the sample requests, which is a Runscope project as far as I know :)
It renders a set of pages in a headless browser, compares them visually and alerts you if something changed.
Just a few lines of bash as you can see. But it turned out to be pretty useful. UrlDiff is a regular part of our regression testing at Product Chart now.
Just the other day I needed something similar and was disappointed that I could find it.
I wanted to discuss something with a remote colleague and to illustrate it I wanted a visual diff of two files. I was hoping there was a nice little web app offering this but I was forced to screenshare (I could have terminal-shared but it was more hassle).
I was hoping for something like Etherpad but with a live visual diff.
Not working on Safari Version 8.0.6 (10600.6.3) Mac OS X 10.10.3
From JS Console:
[Error] TypeError: undefined is not a function (evaluating 'Array.from(e)')
_toConsumableArray2 (app.min.js.pagespeed.ce.ozGaCBt6Kj.js, line 1)
s (app.min.js.pagespeed.ce.ozGaCBt6Kj.js, line 1)
f (app.min.js.pagespeed.ce.ozGaCBt6Kj.js, line 1)
onload (app.min.js.pagespeed.ce.ozGaCBt6Kj.js, line 1)
It's pretty easy to write a recursive diff function that compares JSON strings, in order to avoid the JSON -> diff by line hack that you're doing. But it's a clever hack that easily translates to the command-line.
If you're looking for something similar, but with more features that natively understand HTTP, check out www.runscope.com. Full disclosure, I'm an employee and proud of what we've built!
Right. I was aiming to do it client-side only but I found out that web browsers restrict the headers you have access to through cross-origin XHR requests [1][2].
So it was a trade-off and I preferred showing all the headers at the expense of having to proxy the calls through a server.
diff <(curl -sS -L https://httpbin.org/get) <(curl -sS -L https://httpbin.org/get?show_env=1)