• OpenClassroom

 

Notes

• There are two types of requests that you make online: ones where everything is in the URL bar and ones where there is some stuff that isn't in the URL bar. A GET request, which asks a server to give you a resource (ie, a webpage), has everything in the URL bar. A POST request, which posts some information to a server, has variables that aren't in the URL bar. There are also other HTTP verbs like PUT, HEAD, and DELETE, but they aren't quite as common as POST and GET.
• Variables, regardless of what HTTP verb, are in the form foo=bar&bar=baz -- that is, they are in name=value pairs, with multiple variables separated by ampersands. In GET requests, the variables are at the end of the URL bar (between the resource and a hashtag, if one is present). In POST requests, they are at the start of the data portion of the HTTP request.
• curl issues a GET request by default, so to issue a get request, you just need to use curl normally, specifying any variables at the end of the URL. The following flags help you with POST requests
• -d, --data "NAME=VALUE" POSTs the pair name=value as data. For instance, curl example.com -d "foo=bar" -d "name=sam" POSTs two variables, foo and name, to example.com, with values bar and sam.
• -F, --form "NAME=@SOME_FILE" lets you upload a file. You can't mix -F and -d because they are different types of HTTP requests with different headers. Anything that you put after the @ sign is interpreted as a file that you're uploading to the remote server via POST.
• --data-urlencode "NAME=VALUE" does URL encoding for you so that you can include special characters without worries.