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Restish

Restish is an MIT-licensed CLI for REST-ish HTTP APIs that discovers OpenAPI descriptions to generate API-aware commands, with profiles, auth, pagination and structured output.

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Introduction

Restish is a command-line tool for working with REST-like HTTP APIs. It can make generic requests, but its distinctive feature is discovering OpenAPI descriptions and generating API-aware commands, so restish myapi list-users works once an API is registered.

It manages profiles and authentication, renders structured output as JSON, YAML or tables, filters and projects responses, follows pagination links and caches responses. The README says Restish v2 is the active release line.

In the quality loop it helps with API exploration and scripted checks, especially against APIs with good OpenAPI descriptions.

The source code is at rest-sh/restish on GitHub under the MIT licence, with about 1,400 stars; the most recent commit was on 29 September 2026.

Features

  1. OpenAPI discovery: Generated commands from API descriptions.
  2. Auth profiles: Per-API profiles and authentication settings.
  3. Output formats: JSON, YAML and tables.
  4. Filtering: Shorthand queries on responses.
  5. Pagination: Follows link relations automatically.

Pros

  1. Faster API exploration: Commands match the API’s operations.
  2. Free to use: Open source under the MIT licence, so the core tool costs nothing to use.
  3. Actively maintained: The repository had commits as recent as 29 September 2026.

Cons

  1. Niche: Smaller community than HTTPie or curl.
  2. No test runner: Pair with Hurl or code for assertions.
restish api.rest.sh/images -o table --rsh-columns name,format,self

Resources:

Pricing

Restish is free and open source under the MIT licence.

  1. Developers working with OpenAPI-described APIs from the terminal.
  2. Not a fit for test automation on its own.

Conclusion

Restish is a smart, maintained CLI that makes OpenAPI-described APIs easy to explore.

On CheckOps, Restish is filed under the API & contract testing stage. Related tools listed here include HTTPie, xh, Curl, Hurl, Posting and Bruno. Before choosing, compare them on licence, supported languages and platforms, hosting model, and how well each fits your existing CI pipeline. Facts on this page were checked against the official website, documentation and repository on 11 November 2026; statements the vendor makes about its own product are marked as vendor claims.

Alternatives

Other tools on CheckOps that cover similar ground. Open a page, or compare one with Restish side by side.