Show HN: t-req – Open-source programmable API engine built on .http files

3 points

3 months ago

Hey HN! I've been building t-req over the past few months -- an open-source (MIT) programmable API engine built on the .http file format. I'm an engineer who went through a Postman-to-Insomnia migration with a team and got tired of learning proprietary DSLs when we already had Vitest and test runners in our codebase. Once agentic coding tools entered the workflow, the simplicity gap widened and the context switching was painful. So I built t-req around .http files and focused on making them programmable rather than just runnable.

Every .http tool I looked at treated the format as something you click "run" on and read the response. I wanted to treat it as an input to an engine. Write your requests as .http files -- they're plain text, any agent or editor can work with them -- then run them from anywhere, test them with any runner, and extend them with plugins.

Some features:

- Runs from every surface -- the same .http file works from the TUI, CLI, VS Code, Cursor, web, or as a server.

- Programmable from any test runner -- @t-req/core returns standard objects, use expect() in Vitest, Jest, or Bun test like you already do.

- treq serve exposes your collection as an HTTP server callable from any language.

Github: https://github.com/tensorix-labs/t-req

Docs: https://t-req.io/