Cogs and Levers A blog full of technical stuff

Testing REST APIs with cURL

16 May 2013

Introduction

Testing is a large component of any software development done, sometimes though - you don’t want to go through a full unit test suite just to see what a REST service is doing. I’ve come across some interesting concepts with cURL that will certainly be a shortcut benefit to seeing what responses your REST services are returning.

Requests

You can simulate all of the different HTTP verbs against any URL you’d like using cURL with the following syntax at the console:

# Retrieve person (id: 1)
$ curl -i -X GET http://localhost/service/people/1

# Retrieve all people
$ curl -i -X GET http://localhost/service/people

# Delete person (id: 1)
$ curl -i -X DELETE http://localhost/service/people/1

# Create a new person
$ curl -i -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"first_name": "John", "last_name": "Smith"}' http://localhost/service/people

# Modify a person (id: 1)
$ curl -i -X PUT -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"first_name": "Jane", "last_name": "Smith"}' http://localhost/service/people/1

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