STHTTPRequest

A NSURLConnection wrapper for humans

Simple...

• 700 lines of Objective-C you can understand
• runs on iOS 5+ and Mac OS X 10.7+
• just drag-and-drop .h and .m in your project
• new BSD license

... yet powerful

• synchronous and asynchronous (block based) calls
• easy to set request headers, cookies and POST data
• easy to get response status, headers and encoding
• file upload with progress block
• fast and simple HTTP authentication

Usable in unit tests

You can fill a queue with fake responses to be consumed by requests started from unit tests.

Typical usage

STHTTPRequest *r = [STHTTPRequest requestWithURLString:@"http://google.com"];
    
r.completionBlock = ^(NSDictionary *headers, NSString *body) {
    // ...
};

r.errorBlock = ^(NSError *error) {
    // ...
};

[r startAsynchronous];

Notes:

• STHTTPRequest must be used from the main thread
• success block and error block are called on main thread

Starting a synchronous request

NSError *error = nil;
NSString *body = [r startSynchronousWithError:&error];

Getting HTTP data and metadata

NSInteger     status   = r.responseStatus;
NSDictionary *headers  = r.responseHeaders;
NSString     *encoding = r.responseStringEncodingName;
NSData       *data     = r.responseData;

Adding a request header

[r setHeaderWithName:@"test" value:@"1234"];

Adding a request cookie

[r addCookieWithName:@"test" value:@"1234"];

Setting a POST dictionary

r.POSTDictionary = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:@"1234" forKey:@"test"];

Setting credentials

[r setUsername:@"test" password:@"1234"];

Uploading a file

[r setFileToUpload:@"/tmp/photo.jpg" parameterName:@"photo"];

Setting a download progress block

r.downloadProgressBlock = ^(NSData *dataJustReceived,
                            NSInteger totalBytesReceived,
                            NSInteger totalBytesExpectedToReceive) {
    // notify user of download progress
}

Log the requests

To log human readable debug description, add launch argument -STHTTPRequestShowDebugDescription 1.

GET https://raw.github.com/github/media/master/octocats/octocat.png
HEADERS
    Cookie = asd=sdf; xxx=yyy
COOKIES
    asd = sdf
    xxx = yyy

To log curl description, add launch argument -STHTTPRequestShowCurlDescription 1.

$ curl -i \
-b "asd=sdf;xxx=yyy" \
-H "Cookie: asd=sdf; xxx=yyy,asd=sdf; xxx=yyy" \
"https://raw.github.com/github/media/master/octocats/octocat.png"

(Curl is a command-line tool shipped with OS X that can craft and send HTTP requests.)