How to simulate HTTP requests?

Question

How to simulate HTTP requests. For example, I want to simulate request to insert data into my database, to check safety and reliability of my program. Are there some good tools ?

Answer 1

For *nix OS you can use telnet, curl or wget utilites:

Telnet:

user@host:~$ telnet localhost 80
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /api.php?param1=10&param2=20 HTTP/1.1   # here is your request params
Host: localhost                             # required HTTP header
                                            # double ENTER for sending request

Check telnet man-page of your OS for advanced options.

Curl:

user@host:~$ curl \
--header 'Host: localhost' \
--user-agent 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux x86_64; rv:10.0.12) Gecko/ Firefox/10.0.12' \
--no-keepalive \
http://localhost/api.php?param1=10&param2=20

Check curl man-page of your OS for advanced options.

Wget:

user@host:~$ wget http://localhost/api.php?param1=10&param2=20

Check wget man-page of your OS for advanced options.

FYI if you choose curl then you'll allow to use power of *nix shell: grep, sed, output redirection and a lot of other useful stuff.

Answer 2

If you want to try from the server side cURL is definitely the easiest way. Since you tagged this question with PHP here is a simple PHP script that simulates a POST request.

<?php
$url = "http://yoursite.com/yourscript.php";
$postdata = array (
    "name" => "Joe",
    "address" => "Some street",
    "state" => "NY",
);

$req = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($req, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($req, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postdata);
curl_setopt($req, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$data = curl_exec($req);

If you want to try requests from the browser there are very good extensions for both Chrome and Firefox. For example (for chrome) POSTMAN or Advanced REST client.