🔗 CurlReq (a love letter to sigils)

Last week I was debugging an integration I had built with a 3rd party API. Nothing was going right, and to make matters worse, the error code I was getting back ("611 system error") wasn't helpful in the least. I needed to open a support ticket to proceed.

I use Req to make HTTP requests, but I can't just paste my %Req.Request{} struct into an email and expect the person on the other side (who has no knowledge of Elixir) to understand what is going on. So there I was, converting my request struct into an equivalent curl command when I thought "surely someone has built this as a library already!". Unfortunately this turned out not to be the case, so the obvious follow-up thought popped into my head, "gap in the market!" and I set out to build my own.

request
|> CurlReq.inspect(label: "MY_REQUEST")
|> Req.request!()

Getting a working to_curl/1 function was not really that hard. Adding inspect/2 makes it a lot more ergonomic, since now you can just toss in a line right before you make your request. This is quite useful and I expect it will make some people happy.

Now my itch has been scratched, and I invite whoever is reading this announcement to use this library if you find it useful, and if you find it lacking, or discover your own itches to scratch, to improve it with a PR! You can find the package here: GitHub, hex.pm, and hexdocs.