Read a paste

Fetch a paste's rendered reader page or its raw bytes from paste.hep.gg. The raw endpoint is the programmatic read path.

Every paste has two read URLs: a rendered HTML reader page for humans, and a raw plaintext endpoint for scripts. Public and unlisted pastes need no authentication. Private pastes are readable only by their owner's signed-in session.

The paste ID in the path is the value you got back as data.id (or the tail of data.url) when you created it. IDs match [A-Za-z0-9_-] and are 4 to 80 characters long.

Reader page#

Returns text/html: a syntax-highlighted reader page with the title, language, view count, created and expiry timestamps, and size. It ships both a dark and a light rendering and swaps by the visitor's prefers-color-scheme. This is what opening the link in a browser shows.

A missing, expired, or not-visible paste returns 404 with an HTML not-found page.

Raw content#

Returns text/plain; charset=utf-8 with the paste content and no markup. This is the endpoint to hit from curl, wget, or any program that wants the original bytes.

• Public pastes are served with Cache-Control: public, max-age=60, so a repeated fetch within a minute may come from cache.
• Unlisted and private pastes are served no-store.
• A missing, expired, or not-visible paste returns 404 with the plaintext body Not found.

curl https://paste.hep.gg/aB3dE6kp/raw

const res = await fetch("https://paste.hep.gg/aB3dE6kp/raw");
if (res.status === 404) throw new Error("paste not found or expired");
const content = await res.text();
console.log(content);

Pull a config or script down and run it in one line:

curl -fsSL https://paste.hep.gg/aB3dE6kp/raw | bash

Visibility and access#

There is no JSON metadata endpoint on the public host. To list your own pastes or fetch their metadata, use the dashboard or the session-authed /api/v1/snippets API while signed in.