--no-output overrides --include: only show headers of the response

[Jiehong]

What is the current bug behavior?

Running echo 'GET https://www.wikipedia.org' | hurl --include --no-output shows nothing on stdout, yet headers should be displayed.

What is the expected correct behavior?

Body should not be printed, but headers should.

Execution context

• Hurl Version (hurl --version):

hurl --version
hurl 5.0.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin23.0) libcurl/8.7.1 (SecureTransport) LibreSSL/3.3.6 zlib/1.2.12 nghttp2/1.61.0
Features (libcurl):  alt-svc AsynchDNS HSTS HTTP2 IPv6 Largefile libz NTLM SPNEGO SSL UnixSockets
Features (built-in): brotli

Possible fixes

A workaround exists for the http method GET: use HEAD instead.

However, this does not work with PUT or POST for example.

There should be a way to only display the response headers without the body.

Perhaps a new option --no-body could be introduced.

Note: the manual entry for --no-output seems partially misleading, and talks about the body:

       --no-output

              Suppress output. By default, Hurl outputs the body of the last response.

              This is a cli-only option.

[jcamiel]

Hi @Jiehong

I think curl's --include output headers on stdout.

For instance:

$ curl http://localhost:8000/hello
Hello World!%       

$ curl --include http://localhost:8000/hello
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Werkzeug/3.0.6 Python/3.12.4
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2024 13:56:41 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 12
Server: Flask Server
Connection: close

Hello World!%       

$ curl --include --output /dev/null http://localhost:8000/hello
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100    12  100    12    0     0   5842      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  6000

So when curl uses --include and --output /dev/null, it doesn't display headers.
Given this, we want Hurl to work as curl so it makes sense that echo 'GET http://localhost:8000/hello' | hurl --include --output /dev/null is displaying nothing.

Now, you may want to display only headers. A potential solution will be (as mentionned in #1745) to implement --dump-header or --write-out:

$ curl --dump-header - --silent --output /dev/null http://localhost:8000/hello
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Werkzeug/3.0.6 Python/3.12.4
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2024 14:04:30 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 12
Server: Flask Server
Connection: close