The response from RestMan on a raw request looks like a string, but is actually one of these. 99% of the time you're making a rest call all you care about is the body, but on the occasion you want to fetch the headers you can: RestMan.get('http://example.com').headers[:content_type] In addition, if you do not use the response as a string, you can access a Tempfile object at res.file, which contains the path to the raw downloaded request body.