Intended use of [Options] output ?

[CodeMan99]

Hello!

I'm pretty new to hurl in general.

Context

As a proof of concept, I wanted to bootstrap download hurl with a hurlfile.

GET https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/releases/latest
Accept: application/json
[Options]
location: true
HTTP 200
[Captures]
version: jsonpath "$.tag_name"


GET https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/releases/download/{{version}}/hurl_{{version}}_amd64.deb
[Options]
location: true
output: hurl_{{version}}_amd64.deb

Running this file with hurl get_hurl.hurl does work. However, because it is the last request, the deb file is also output on stdout. The first time I did this I assumed that nothing was saved due to seeing the binary barf all over my screen.

Question

Basically, is it intended that the output is both the specified file and stdout?

Other Discussions

#1323

[jcamiel]

Hi,

It's good to have newcomers because we can see what's need to be improved, in the documentation and in the way we present Hurl.

The intended way to behave for Hurl is: By default, Hurl executes all HTTP requests and outputs the response body of the last HTTP call. (see here).

So, given this Hurl file:

GET https://example.org/foo.txt

GET https://example.org/bar.txt

And run like this:

$ hurl sample.hurl

Hurl will output the content of bar.txt on standard output. This is the designed (expected?) behavior. We've done this to be kind of like curl, and to get a unique response in workflows that require multiple steps.

You can save the output of the last response like this:

$ hurl sample.hurl > out.txt

Or

$ hurl --output out.txt sample.hurl

Note that we have a current bug for binary responses (see #2306): like curl, for binary responses, we should not output the last response to standard output.

We have also a way to specify options on a particular request with [Options] sections. We can use it if we want intermediate responses:

GET https://example.org/foo.txt
[Options]
output: out1.txt

GET https://example.org/bar.txt

GET https://example.org/baz.txt
[Options]
output: out2.txt

And run with this:

$ hurl --no-output sample.hurl

I've specified --no-output because I've written in the Hurl file where I want my last response to be saved.

With Hurl 4.3.0 (not released yet), you can use - to indicate that you want a specific response on stdout:

# This will go on standard output
GET https://example.org/foo.txt
[Options]
output: -

GET https://example.org/bar.txt

GET https://example.org/baz.txt
[Options]
output: out2.txt

I hope it's more clear!

[CodeMan99]

Thanks for explaining. Is there an in-file option to turn off the stdout response of the last request? Can I for example do this?

GET https://example.com/foo.txt

GET https://example.com/bar.txt
[Options]
output: bar.txt
no-output: true

Note that I have not yet attempted this.