I often want to know the status code of a curl request, but I don’t want that extra information to mess with the response body that it prints to stdout.
What to do?
Render an image instead, of course!
curlcat takes the same params as curl, but it uses iTerm2’s imgcat tool to draw an “HTTP Cat” of the status code.
It even sends the image to stderr instead of stdout, so you can still pipe curlcat to jq or something.
#!/usr/bin/env zsh
stdoutfile=$( mktemp )
curl -sw "\n%{http_code}" $@ > $stdoutfile
exitcode=$?
if [[ $exitcode == 0 ]]; then
statuscode=$( cat $stdoutfile | tail -1 )
if [[ ! -f $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode ]]; then
curl -so $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode https://http.cat/$statuscode
fi
imgcat $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode 1>&2
fi
cat $stdoutfile | ghead -n -1
exit $exitcode
Note: This is macOS-specific, as written, but as long as your terminal supports images, you should be able to adapt it just fine.
If you’re not deliberately min-maxing the CAP Theorem or doing EDA, there’s no reason to use microservices and every reason not to.
It is not just an implementation detail or a matter of preference. There are fundamental UX implications.
That can be a net positive for users (and developers). But if you’re doing it “just cuz”, you’re gonna have a bad time.