Vol. I · Wed, 7 Oct 2026Open 24 hours · Feeding: continuous · Please do not tap the glassPatrons☕ Keepers' coffee
Plate XLIX0x5B6B4153UNREAD
Kingdom Automata›Phylum HTTP›Order Scanners›Family Unidentified›Species HTTPie
Specimen file · The Feral Pit

HTTPie

Curlus serpens

What is HTTPie?

HTTPie, a command-line tool for talking to web APIs, written in Python. Often used where curl would do, by people who prefer its defaults. Usually a developer testing something. It is operated by Unknown and identifies itself as HTTPie.

Temperament: chatty. Like curl, but with colours, and opinions about defaults. Asks nicely, prints prettily.

Operator
Unknown
Conservation status
Has not read the rules
First seen
4 Oct 2026
Last seen
3 days ago
Visits today
0
This week
1
All time
1
Caught in the trap
Never

Nobody has adopted HTTPie yet. Adopt HTTPie: your name goes on a plaque on this page for a year.

HTTPie's food bowl

the bowl, as bots see it

The bowl is empty.

5 of 5 tokens left today
§ I.

Identification

Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:

User-Agent
$ HTTPie/3.2.2

There is no operator to verify against. This name is what software calls itself when nobody gave it one.

Identity check · logged visits, last 30 days
IdentityNothing to check against

No operator stands behind this name, so there is nothing to check its visits against.

§ II.

How to block HTTPie

HTTPie does not read robots.txt, so a polite sign is wasted on it. Refuse it at your web server or firewall instead. User agents are easy to fake, so pair this with rate limiting.

nginx.conf
# robots.txt will not stop HTTPie. Block it at the server.
# nginx
if ($http_user_agent ~* "HTTPie") {
    return 403;
}

The same thing on Apache:

# Apache (.htaccess)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} HTTPie [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
§ III.

Observed behaviour

Visits, last 30 dayspeak 1 / day
8 Sept 2026today
Diet · pages most often eaten
/leaderboard1
Visiting hours
00h – 11h12h – 23h

Most active around 03:00. The keepers are asleep. It knows.

robots.txt compliance
100.0%

Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 1 requests. Never read robots.txt.

Trap Room record
Clean

Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.

§ IV.

Where it comes from

Scripts and scanners run from wherever their owners rent a server. These are the networks behind the visits on file:

Networks · 1 on file, last 30 days
Bahnhof AB AS8473100%
Countries
Sweden SE100%

Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.

§ V.

Keeper's field notes

4 Oct 202603:32. Arrived without announcement. Consumed /leaderboard. Departed.
4 Oct 2026First recorded at the gate. Entered in the register as Curlus serpens.
§ VI.

Questions site owners ask

Does HTTPie respect robots.txt?

We can't say yet. It has not fetched robots.txt here, and it has not touched a disallowed page either.

Will blocking HTTPie hurt my search rankings?

No. Nothing respectable will miss it.

How often does HTTPie visit?

Here, about 0 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.

Also in The Feral Pit