// the take
httpbin is a Flask app that echoes back whatever HTTP request you send it — headers, cookies, status codes, redirects, auth challenges — as JSON. It's for anyone writing an HTTP client, testing library, or proxy who needs a predictable endpoint to throw requests at instead of mocking one.
Covers an unusually wide surface of HTTP semantics in one place: redirects (absolute/relative/n-hop), status code forcing, streaming responses, basic/digest/bearer auth, gzip/deflate, and form/multipart parsing — you'd otherwise stitch together several test fixtures to get this coverage. Ships as a single Docker image with no config, so it drops into a CI pipeline or docker-compose stack in one line. It's become the de facto standard fixture referenced by requests, curl docs, and countless client-library test suites, so behavior is well understood and Stack Overflow has an answer for every endpoint.
Last commit is from May 2024 and the project has had long stretches of low maintenance before that — don't expect new endpoints or prompt security patches. CI is wired to Travis CI, which stopped free builds for open source years ago, so the badge is almost certainly lying about build health. The public httpbin.org instance has repeatedly been flagged for SSRF testing and abuse, so self-hosting is the only safe option if you're exposing it beyond localhost. Packaging is stuck on Pipfile/setup.py with no pyproject.toml, and there's no indication of Python 3.12+ compatibility testing.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →