Share HTTP snapshots with Pawprint

Last year we’ve released Pawprint, an easy way to share your HTTP request/response traces online. Today we’re super excited to announce a much improved and open version: a whole new UI, a public REST API, curl integration and iframe support…

Have you ever encountered an API that crashes a 500 and you want to yell at the backend devs who pushed that to prod? These things happen often, live isn’t always perfect! Pawprint makes it trivial to share the full request/response exchange with your colleagues so they can see the exact request you’ve sent and the response you’ve got.

I’ve seen plain HTTP snippets shared on GitHub issues or as examples in Markdown docs. It works fine. But imagine if you had a beautiful UI to visualize the HTTP messages and share them on StackOverflow, Slack, Twitter or GitHub! That’s what we’ve built, it’s free and publicly available. You can send links like this to your friends, as you would with bit.ly’s:

https://paw.pt/bS7KRAWX

Here’s how it looks when embedded as an iframe (for example in an API documentation page):

An HTTP request on Pawprint (as if embedded as an iframe)

We’ve made a minimal and intuitive UI so one can visualize the request & response in a snap. It now displays formatted JSON bodies, headers, query params, raw HTTP messages, and request timings when available.

Quickly share an HTTP trace from Paw

Of course Paw has been integrated with Pawprint from day one, and still is the best way to share HTTP snapshots. On an HTTP exchange in Paw, you can hit the share button and generate a Pawprint link. This link is copied and you can paste it anywhere (GitHub issues, Tweets, JIRA…).

Embeddable Pawprints

We hinted at it before, you can now embed these little snippets into webpages! That’s especially great to use Pawprints as examples in API documentation pages or blogs.

Public API

While the integration with Paw is amazing, Pawprint is a free public service open to anyone! It goes without saying that Pawprint has a great REST API to create and retrieve entries. It’s pretty straightforward, create a new entry with either a HAR (HTTP Archive) file or with a raw HTTP trace. You can find the documentation on Apiary.

Command Line tool for curl

I remember that I started working on Paw with the goal of making an HTTP client so easy to use and full-featured that no one would be using curl anymore… That was a little extreme, and I have to admit, curl is super useful from time to time! So we’ve published pawprint-cli, a command line utility (written in Node.js) that captures a curl trace and publishes it to Pawprint.

Try it now! It’s not that scary:

1. Install the CLI tool: npm install -g pawpt
2. Prepare a curl request to your favorite API (e.g. curl https://httpbin.org/get)
3. Add to the end: -- trace - | pawpt

You’ll get a short link to your newly created Pawprint. Share it with the world!

Our goal is to make Paw the most advanced and beautifully designed set of tools for API providers and consumers. Our main app is an HTTP client on Mac, but it’s just the beginning. We know that there’s so much to do, but we prefer to move one step at a time and do the right things. Stay tuned.

Cover photo: Unsplash