Restish Blog
Notes on Restish releases, API tooling, OpenAPI, CLI design, automation, plugins, and the decisions behind the project.
The Restish blog is for release stories, API tooling ideas, and deeper notes on the design choices behind the CLI. For task-focused help, start with the documentation. For the shortest hands-on path, use the browser tour.
API shell scripts fail in predictable ways — silent HTTP errors, hand-rolled pagination, no retries, unparseable output. Restish bakes the boring reliability into the CLI with stdout and stderr discipline, HTTP-aware exit codes, bounded pagination, and retry and timeout flags.
Restish can now render API responses as TOON, a compact text encoding of the JSON data model that cuts token costs when an LLM agent reads the result. Here is where it wins, where it loses, and how to combine it with filtering.
OpenAPI can be more than SDK input or Swagger UI data. Restish loads API descriptions at runtime and turns them into shell-native commands with profiles, auth, output, pagination, and MCP-ready extension points.
Restish v2 keeps the fast one-off HTTP workflow, then turns OpenAPI-described APIs into shell-native commands with profiles, auth, output filtering, pagination, plugins, and MCP.