http-client

Structured HTTP requests for agents — so they stop shelling out to curl and hand-parsing output. One tool, a clean request in, a structured response out (status, headers, parsed JSON body), with auth, retries, and timeouts built in.

http_request({ url: "https://api.example.com/users", query: { active: true }, bearer_env: "API_TOKEN" })
→ { ok: true, status: 200, body: { users: [ … ] }, duration_ms: 180, attempts: 1 }

Why

curl works but is fragile from an agent: shell-escaping bodies, no structured result, no retry, secrets pasted on the command line. This makes an HTTP call a typed operation — and auth via bearer_env means the token comes from an environment variable, never the call itself.

The tool

http_request — params: url, method, headers, query, json (body), body, bearer_env / bearer_token, basic_user/basic_pass, timeout_ms, retries. Returns { ok, status, status_text, headers, body (parsed if JSON), body_truncated, content_type, duration_ms, attempts, error? }.

• Retries on 5xx and network errors (exponential-ish backoff).
• Timeout via AbortController → a structured error, never a throw.
• JSON request bodies (json) and auto-parsed JSON responses.
• Bodies capped (default 100 KB) with body_truncated flagged.
• http/https only.

Setup

npm install
npm test    # runs against a local mock server — no network needed

claude mcp add http-client -- node /abs/path/http-client/dist/server.js
# CLI: agent-http GET https://api.github.com/zen
#      agent-http POST https://api.example.com/x --json '{"a":1}' --bearer-env API_TOKEN

Honest limits

• No SSRF guard — it'll request internal URLs. Fine for a local dev agent; don't expose it to untrusted callers without an allowlist.
• Response bodies are truncated past the cap (raise max_body_kb if needed).
• No streaming — returns the (capped) full body.