What are good tools for working with a backend server?

I’ve used a web browser, cURL, openssl client, and Python for getting to a back end REST server. I’ve recently discovered HTTPie. For example

https GET https://127.0.0.1:7554/application/loggers –cert colinpaice.pem –cert-key colinpaice.key.pem –verify ca.pem2

This invokes some Python code which does all the work. It produced

The documentation is here.

Keep a session

By default each request is a single shot, nothing is retained (such as a Java Web Token) so you need to enter your credentials every time.

However, HTTPie also supports persistent sessions via the --session=SESSION_NAME_OR_PATH option. In a session, custom HTTP headers (except for the ones starting with Content- or If-), authentication, and cookies (manually specified or sent by the server) persist between requests to the same host.

Named sessions

You can create one or more named session per host. For example, this is how you can create a new session named user1

http --session=user1 -a user1:password .... 

From now on, you can refer to the session by its name (user1). When you choose to use the session again, all previously specified authentication or HTTP headers will automatically be set.

Plugins

There are plugins available see here. For example authentication