How to POST JSON data with Curl from Terminal/Comm

Question

I use Ubuntu and installed Curl on it. I want to test my Spring REST application with Curl. I wrote my POST code at Java side. However, I want to test it with Curl. I am trying to post a JSON data. An example data is like this:

{"value":"30","type":"Tip 3","targetModule":"Target 3","configurationGroup":null,"name":"Configuration Deneme 3","description":null,"identity":"Configuration Deneme 3","version":0,"systemId":3,"active":true}

I use this command:

curl -i \
    -H "Accept: application/json" \
    -H "X-HTTP-Method-Override: PUT" \
    -X POST -d "value":"30","type":"Tip 3","targetModule":"Target 3","configurationGroup":null,"name":"Configuration Deneme 3","description":null,"identity":"Configuration Deneme 3","version":0,"systemId":3,"active":true \
    http://localhost:8080/xx/xxx/xxxx

It returns this error:

HTTP/1.1 415 Unsupported Media Type
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 1051
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:50:17 GMT

The error description is this:

The server refused this request because the request entity is in a format not supported by the requested resource for the requested method ().

Tomcat log: "POST /ui/webapp/conf/clear HTTP/1.1" 415 1051

Any ideas about the right format of the Curl command?

EDIT:

This is my Java side PUT code (I have tested GET and DELETE and they work)

@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.PUT)
public Configuration updateConfiguration(HttpServletResponse response, @RequestBody Configuration configuration) { //consider @Valid tag
    configuration.setName("PUT worked");
    //todo If error occurs response.sendError(HttpServletResponse.SC_NOT_FOUND);
    return configuration;
} 

Answer 1

This worked well for me.

curl -X POST --data @json_out.txt http://localhost:8080/

Where,

-X Means the http verb.

--data Means the data you want to send.

Answer 2

A bit late to the party, but I don't see this posted, so here goes, you could also put your json in a file and pass it to curl using --file-upload option via standard input, like this:

 echo 'my.awesome.json.function({"do" : "whatever"})' | curl -X POST "http://url" -T -

Answer 3

For Windows, having a single quote for the -d value did not work for me, but it did work after changing to double quote. Also I needed to escape double quotes inside curly brackets.

That is, the following did not work:

curl -i -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"key":"val"}' http://localhost:8080/appname/path

But the following worked:

curl -i -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{\"key\":\"val\"}" http://localhost:8080/appname/path

Answer 4

I just run into the same problem. I could solve it by specifying

-H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8"

Answer 5

You can pass the extension of the format you want as the end of the url. like http://localhost:8080/xx/xxx/xxxx.json

or

http://localhost:8080/xx/xxx/xxxx.xml

Note: you need to add jackson and jaxb maven dependencies in your pom.

Answer 6

It worked for me using:

curl -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"id":100}' http://localhost/api/postJsonReader.do

It was happily mapped to the Spring controller:

@RequestMapping(value = "/postJsonReader", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public @ResponseBody String processPostJsonData(@RequestBody IdOnly idOnly) throws Exception {
        logger.debug("JsonReaderController hit! Reading JSON data!"+idOnly.getId());
        return "JSON Received";
}

IdOnly is a simple POJO with an id property.