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

As an example, create a JSON file, params.json, and add this content to it:

[
    {
        "environment": "Devel",
        "description": "Machine for test, please do not delete!"
    }
]

Then you run this command:

curl -v -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST --data @params.json -u your_username:your_password http://localhost:8000/env/add_server

Answer 2

This worked well for me, additionally using BASIC authentication:

curl -v --proxy '' --basic -u Administrator:password -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json"
        --data-binary '{"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://httpbin.org/post

Of course, you should never use BASIC authentication without SSL and a checked certificate.

I ran into this again today, using Cygwin's cURL 7.49.1 for Windows... And when using --data or --data-binary with a JSON argument, cURL got confused and would interpret the {} in the JSON as a URL template. Adding a -g argument to turn off cURL globbing fixed that.

See also Passing a URL with brackets to curl.

Answer 3

HTTPie is a recommended alternative to curl because you can do just

$ http POST http://example.com/some/endpoint name=value name1=value1

It speaks JSON by default and will handle both setting the necessary header for you as well encoding data as valid JSON. There is also:

Some-Header:value

for headers, and

name==value

for query string parameters. If you have a large chunk of data, you can also read it from a file have it be JSON encoded:

 field=@file.txt

Answer 4

Using CURL Windows, try this:

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d "{\"firstName\": \"blablabla\",\"lastName\": \"dummy\",\"id\": \"123456\"}" http-host/_ah/api/employeeendpoint/v1/employee

Answer 5

If you're testing a lot of JSON send/responses against a RESTful interface, you may want to check out the Postman plug-in for Chrome (which allows you to manually define web service tests) and its Node.js-based Newman command-line companion (which allows you to automate tests against "collections" of Postman tests.) Both free and open!