ericktucto / cartero

Cartero will be a GTK+4 application to test HTTP APIs and make HTTP requests graphically.

Cartero

Make HTTP requests and test APIs.

🚧 This is a work in progress and therefore you should expect that the application may not have all the features at this moment.

Motivation

This project exists because there aren't many native graphical HTTP testing applications / graphical alternatives to cURL that are fully free software, and I think the world has had enough of Electron / non-native applications that are anonymously accesible until one day you are forced to create an account and log in to use.

Roadmap

v0.1 is the first iteration and development is in progress. The goal with version v0.1 is to have a basic user interface to make HTTP requests graphically, supporting only the most basic features:

• Make HTTP requests setting the endpoint URL and the HTTP verb to use.
• Configure the payload and the request headers.
• Get the response headers, body, status code, size and duration of a request.

To achieve version 0.1, the following has to be done:

• Settle on the project structure (translations, GTK, build tools...)
• Design the user interface components (GTK 4, probably Adw 1).
• Implement the internal HTTP client and connect it to the user interface.

On future versions, more capabilities will be added:

• Support for persisting requests to re-use them in future sessions.
• Support for variables, which can be configured per environment, such as production, staging or development.
• Export a request as a cURL command or generate code for Axios, net/http and other software libraries.

How to build

Note that compiling via cargo build and cargo run is not supported anymore, since more build steps are required in order to compile the application (translate .blp files into .ui files...). While it may work if you run the commands on your own, it won't be pretty.

Currently, to build the application you'll have to make sure that the required libraries are installed on your system.

• glib >= 2.72
• gtk >= 4.6
• gtksourceview >= 5.4

Meson

Make sure that you have Meson in your system. For instance,

sudo apt install meson
sudo dnf install meson
sudo pacman -S meson

Then use the following commands to build and install the application

meson setup build
ninja -C build
ninja -C build install

To avoid installing system-wide the application, you can use a prefix:

meson setup build --prefix=~/.local
ninja -C build
ninja -C build install

During development mode, you may also prefer to install into the development directory. Because the application may depend on files generated by Meson that are installed into specific locations, this may be a required step if you suddenly cannot run the application due to missing schemas or resources.

meson setup build --prefix=install
ninja -C build
ninja -C build install
install/bin/cartero

If you plan on contributing to the project, use the development profile.

meson setup build -Dprofile=development

It will also configure a Git hook so that the source code is checked prior to authoring a Git commit. The hook runs cargo fmt to assert that the code is formatted. Read hooks/pre-commit.hook to inspect what the script does.

Contributing

🐛 This project is currently a larva trying to grow. Do you want to get in? Take a seat!

This project is highly appreciative of contributions. If you know about Rust, GTK or the GNOME technologies and want to help during the development, you can contribute if you wish. Fork the project and commit your code.

Some checklist rules before submitting a pull request:

• Use a feature branch, do not make your changes in the trunk branch directly.

• Rebase your code and make sure that you are working on top of the most recent version of the trunk branch, in case something has changed while you were working on your code.

• Update the locales if you changed strings. The ninja target that you are looking for is called cartero-update-po (such as ninja -C build cartero-update-po). Don't worry, you don't have to translate the strings by yourself, but make sure that the new templates are added to the .po and .pot files.

• Use the pre-commit hook. The pre-commit hook will validate that your code is formatted. It should be automatically configured if you run Meson in development mode (-Dprofile=development), but you can install it on your own or run hooks/pre-commit.hook.

The project is starting small, so if you want to do something big, it is best to first start a discussion thread with your proposal in order to see how to make it fit inside the application.

While this application is not official and at the moment is not affiliated with GNOME, you are expected to follow the GNOME Code of Conduct when interacting with this repository.

Credits and acknowledgments

Cartero is being developed by Dani Rodríguez.

Big shoutout to the contributors who have sent patches or translations!

Also, Christian suggested Cartero as the name for the application and I liked it enough to call it like so, therefore shoutout to Christian as well!

Finally, shoutout to many of the GTK and GNOME Circle applications out there whose source code I've read in order to know how to use some of the GTK features that you cannot learn just by reading the official docs.

Blog

Dani's dev blog (in Spanish) of Cartero.