HTTP Request Methods Get vs Put vs Post Explained with Code Examples

In the Authorization tab, set the authorization type to Basic Auth. Type in your GitHub username and pass your personal access token we created in the password field. Type in your Github username and pass your personal access token we created in the password field. We see that in the path we have to pass in a string with the target user’s username. We also see that we have to pass in a header called accept and set it to application/vnd.github.v3+json. This weather app wouldn’t have every city and its weather information coded directly into it. This would make the app bloated and slow, would take forever to research and manually add to a database, and would be a headache to update every single day.

In other words, the body should contain a set of instructions describing how a resource currently residing on the server should be modified to produce a new version. Making two identical POST requests will most likely result in two resources containing the same information but with different identifiers. Support for PATCH in browsers, servers, and web application frameworks is not universal.

2. Example URIs

Collisions from multiple PATCH requests may be more dangerous than PUT collisions because some patch formats need to operate from a known base-point or else they will corrupt the resource. Clients using this kind of patch application should use a conditional request such that the request will fail if the resource has been updated since the client last accessed the resource. For example, the client can use a strong ETag in an If-Match header on the PATCH request. The GET, HEAD, OPTIONS, and TRACE methods are considered safe methods.

Inside of this object, we’ll set the public boolean to true. Then we’ll define the property files, and the value is another object with a key of the name of your new gist.

Server Side

The value for this should be another object whose key is content. The value here should be whatever you want to actually add to the gist. To do that, go to your settings page and hit Generate token. There is a Headers section where we will be passing in headers as instructed by the GitHub docs. PUT requests are idempotent, meaning that executing the same PUT request will always produce the same result. This specification reserves the method name CONNECT for use with a proxy that can dynamically switch to being a tunnel (e.g. SSL tunneling ).

It is now used by more than 46% of websites and supported by almost all web browsers (96% of users). It is also supported by major web servers over Transport Layer Security using an Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation extension where TLS 1.2 or newer is required.

Request methods

The methods GET, HEAD, OPTIONS, and TRACE are defined as safe. They do not exclude side effects though, such as appending request information to a log file or charging an advertising account, since they are not requested by the client, by definition. Ideally, if a resource has been created on the origin server, the response SHOULD be HTTP response code 201 and contain an entity that describes the status of the request and refers to the new resource, and a Location header. Making multiple identical requests must produce the same result every time until another API has changed the state of the resource on the server. HTTP is a stateless application-level protocol and it requires a reliable network transport connection to exchange data between client and server. In HTTP implementations, TCP/IP connections are used using well known ports . In HTTP/2, a TCP/IP connection plus multiple protocol channels are used.

• This means that the PATCH body should not just be a modified part of the resource, but in some kind of patch language like JSON Patch or XML Patch.
• The difference between POST and PUT is that PUT requests are idempotent.
• If you just want to update part of your resource, you still need to send in data for the entire resource when you make a PUT request.
• When a proxy receives an OPTIONS request on an absoluteURI for which request forwarding is permitted, the proxy MUST check for a Max-Forwards field.
• It is now used by 25% of websites and is supported by many web browsers (75% of users).

Nothing wrong with overloading POST where it doesn’t fit the REST definition. Having said that if the payload isn’t too crazy you could try passing it as query params. The below table summarises the use of HTTP methods discussed above. There may be the following possible operations are per the HTTP specification. Use the below-given information to find a suitable HTTP method for the action performed by API. REST APIs enable you to develop all kinds of web applications having all possible CRUD operations.

HTTP Methods

As defined in RFC3986, URIs are encoded as hyperlinks in HTML documents, so as to form interlinked hypertext documents. HTTP/1 was finalized and fully documented (as version 1.0) in 1996. It evolved (as version 1.1) in 1997 and then its specifications were updated in 1999 and in 2014. If you liked this style of teaching, I create content specifically for beginners and early-career engineers on YouTube, Tik Tok, Twitter, and Hashnode. You can also find code snippets and a way to reach me via my personal website. We didn’t actually pass a description to our Gist when we created it, so we can patch this and create one. An easy way to check that your gist was created is to go to your Gists in GitHub.

• The standard reason phrases are only recommendations, and can be replaced with “local equivalents” at the web developer’s discretion.
• Such persistent connections reduce request latency perceptibly because the client does not need to re-negotiate the TCP 3-Way-Handshake connection after the first request has been sent.
• Duplicate requests following a successful request—will have no effect.
• As defined in RFC3986, URIs are encoded as hyperlinks in HTML documents, so as to form interlinked hypertext documents.

Request methods are considered safe if their defined semantics are essentially read-only. The client does not request, and does not expect, any state change on the origin server as a result of applying a safe method to a target resource. The response header fields allow the server to pass additional information beyond the status line, acting as response modifiers. They give information about the server or about further access to the target resource or related resources. According to the design of the HTTP specification, GET requests are used only to read data and not change it. That is, they can be called without risk of data modification or corruption—calling it once has the same effect as calling it 10 times, or none at all. Additionally, GET is idempotent, which means that making multiple identical requests ends up having the same result as a single request.

Use of the Max-Forwards header field allows the client to limit the length of the request chain, which is useful for testing a chain of proxies forwarding messages in an infinite loop. Body is not defined by this specification, but might be defined by future extensions to HTTP. Content negotiation MAY be used to select the appropriate response format.