How to test web service using command line curl

Question

I am building a web service for a web application, and I would like a simple tool to test this as I am developing. I have tried some firefox plug-ins (Poster, 'REST Client'), and even though these work fine I have been unable to upload files with them.

Also, I would rather have a command-line tool that I can use to easily write a set of integration tests for this web service and that I can send to consumers of this web service as an example.

I know that curl can work for this but would like a few examples, especially around authentication (using HTTP Basic) and file uploads.

Answer 1

Answering my own question.

curl -X GET --basic --user username:password \      https://www.example.com/mobile/resource  curl -X DELETE --basic --user username:password \      https://www.example.com/mobile/resource  curl -X PUT --basic --user username:password -d 'param1_name=param1_value' \      -d 'param2_name=param2_value' https://www.example.com/mobile/resource 

POSTing a file and additional parameter

curl -X POST -F 'param_name=@/filepath/filename' \      -F 'extra_param_name=extra_param_value' --basic --user username:password \      https://www.example.com/mobile/resource 

Answer 2

In addition to existing answers it is often desired to format the REST output (typically JSON and XML lacks indentation). Try this:

$ curl https://api.twitter.com/1/help/configuration.xml  | xmllint --format - $ curl https://api.twitter.com/1/help/configuration.json | python -mjson.tool 

Tested on Ubuntu 11.0.4/11.10.

Another issue is the desired content type. Twitter uses .xml/.json extension, but more idiomatic REST would require Accept header:

$ curl -H "Accept: application/json"