httpstat

httpstat visualizes curl(1) statistics in a way of beauty and clarity.

It is a single file🌟 Python script that has no dependency👏 and is compatible with Python 3🍻.

Features

• Beautiful terminal output — timing breakdown of DNS, TCP, TLS, server processing, and content transfer
• Structured JSON output — --format json / jsonl for machine consumption with a stable v1 schema
• SLO threshold checking — --slo total=500,connect=100 exits with code 4 on violation
• Save results to file — --save path.json for multi-step workflows
• NO_COLOR support — respects the NO_COLOR convention
• Agent skill — built-in skill for agent-assisted HTTP performance diagnostics

Installation

There are three ways to get httpstat:

• Download the script directly: wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reorx/httpstat/master/httpstat.py

• Through pip: pip install httpstat

• Through homebrew (macOS only): brew install httpstat

For Windows users, @davecheney's Go version is suggested. → download link

Skills

httpstat ships with an agent skill that teaches AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) how to use httpstat for HTTP performance diagnostics — automatic installation, bottleneck identification, and actionable fix suggestions.

Install the skill into your project:

npx skills add reorx/httpstat

Once installed, your agent will automatically use httpstat when you ask questions like "why is this API slow?" or "debug this endpoint's latency".

Usage

Simply:

python httpstat.py httpbin.org/get

If installed through pip or brew, you can use httpstat as a command:

httpstat httpbin.org/get

cURL Options

Because httpstat is a wrapper of cURL, you can pass any cURL supported option after the url (except for -w, -D, -o, -s, -S which are already used by httpstat):

httpstat httpbin.org/post -X POST --data-urlencode "a=b" -v

Structured Output

Use --format (-f) to get machine-readable output:

httpstat httpbin.org/get --format json

{
  "schema_version": 1,
  "url": "httpbin.org/get",
  "ok": true,
  "exit_code": 0,
  "response": {
    "status_line": "HTTP/2 200",
    "status_code": 200,
    "remote_ip": "...",
    "remote_port": "443",
    "headers": {"Content-Type": "application/json", "Server": "nginx", "...": "..."}
  },
  "timings_ms": {
    "dns": 5, "connect": 10, "tls": 15,
    "server": 50, "transfer": 20, "total": 100,
    "namelookup": 5, "initial_connect": 15,
    "pretransfer": 30, "starttransfer": 80
  },
  "speed": { "download_kbs": 1234.5, "upload_kbs": 0.0 },
  "slo": null
}

Use --format jsonl for compact single-line JSON (useful for log pipelines).

SLO Thresholds

Check response times against thresholds. Exits with code 4 on violation:

httpstat httpbin.org/get --slo total=500,connect=100,ttfb=200

Supported keys: total, connect, ttfb (time to first byte), dns, tls.

In pretty mode, violations are printed in red at the end of the output. In JSON mode, violations appear in the slo field:

{
  "slo": {
    "pass": false,
    "violations": [
      { "key": "total", "threshold_ms": 500, "actual_ms": 823 }
    ]
  }
}

Save Results

Write structured JSON output to a file (works with any --format):

httpstat httpbin.org/get --save result.json
httpstat httpbin.org/get --format json --save result.json

Environment Variables

httpstat has a bunch of environment variables to control its behavior. Here are some usage demos, you can also run httpstat --help to see full explanation.

• HTTPSTAT_SHOW_BODY

  Set to true to show response body in the output, note that body length is limited to 1023 bytes, will be truncated if exceeds. Default is false.

• HTTPSTAT_SHOW_IP

  By default httpstat shows remote and local IP/port address. Set to false to disable this feature. Default is true.

• HTTPSTAT_SHOW_SPEED

  Set to true to show download and upload speed. Default is false.

  copy

  HTTPSTAT_SHOW_SPEED=true httpstat http://cachefly.cachefly.net/10mb.test
  
  ...
  speed_download: 3193.3 KiB/s, speed_upload: 0.0 KiB/s
  

• HTTPSTAT_SAVE_BODY

  By default httpstat stores body in a tmp file, set to false to disable this feature. Default is true

• HTTPSTAT_CURL_BIN

  Indicate the cURL bin path to use. Default is curl from current shell $PATH.

  This exampe uses brew installed cURL to make HTTP2 request:

  copy

  HTTPSTAT_CURL_BIN=/usr/local/Cellar/curl/7.50.3/bin/curl httpstat https://http2.akamai.com/ --http2
  
  HTTP/2 200
  ...
  

  cURL must be compiled with nghttp2 to enable http2 feature (#12).

• HTTPSTAT_METRICS_ONLY

  If set to true, httpstat will only output metrics in json format, this is useful if you want to parse the data instead of reading it.

  Note: This is kept for backward compatibility. Prefer --format json instead.

• HTTPSTAT_DEBUG

  Set to true to see debugging logs. Default is false

• NO_COLOR

  When set (to any value), disables all colored output. See no-color.org for the convention.

  copy

  NO_COLOR=1 httpstat httpbin.org/get
  

For convenience, you can export these environments in your .zshrc or .bashrc, example:

export HTTPSTAT_SHOW_IP=false
export HTTPSTAT_SHOW_SPEED=true
export HTTPSTAT_SAVE_BODY=false

Related Projects

Here are some implementations in various languages:

• Go: davecheney/httpstat

  This is the Go alternative of httpstat, it's written in pure Go and relies no external programs. Choose it if you like solid binary executions (actually I do).

• Go (library): tcnksm/go-httpstat

  Other than being a cli tool, this project is used as library to help debugging latency of HTTP requests in Go code, very thoughtful and useful, see more in this article

• Bash: b4b4r07/httpstat

  This is what exactly I want to do at the very beginning, but gave up due to not confident in my bash skill, good job!

• Node: yosuke-furukawa/httpstat

  b4b4r07 mentioned this in his article, could be used as a HTTP client also.

• PHP: talhasch/php-httpstat

  The PHP implementation by @talhasch

Some code blocks in httpstat are copied from other projects of mine, have a look:

• reorx/python-terminal-color Drop-in single file library for printing terminal color.

• reorx/getenv Environment variable definition with type.