Main Tutorials

cURL – POST request examples

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Some cURL POST request examples for self reference.

1. Normal POST

1.1 To POST without data.


$ curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/login/

1.2 To POST with data.


$ curl -d "username=mkyong&password=abc" http://localhost:8080/api/login/

1.3 Spring REST to accept normal POST data.


    @PostMapping("/api/login")
    public ResponseEntity<?> login(@RequestParam("username") String username,
                                    @RequestParam("password") String password) {
        //...
    }

    @PostMapping("/api/login")
    public ResponseEntity<?> login(@ModelAttribute Login login) {
        //...
    }

2. POST + Multipart

To POST with a file, add this -F file=@"path/to/data.txt"

2.1 Upload a file


$ curl -F file=@"path/to/data.txt" http://localhost:8080/api/upload/

2.2 Upload multiple files, with extra fields :


$ curl -F extraField="abc" -F files=@"path/to/data.txt" -F files=@"path/to/data2.txt"  http://localhost:8080/api/upload/multi/

2.3 Spring REST to accept POST Multipart data.


    @PostMapping("/api/upload")
    public ResponseEntity<?> uploadFile(
            @RequestParam("file") MultipartFile uploadfile) {
        //...
    }
	
    @PostMapping("/api/upload/multi")
    public ResponseEntity<?> uploadFiles(
            @RequestParam("extraField") String extraField,
            @RequestParam("files") MultipartFile[] uploadfiles) {
        //...
    }
	
    @PostMapping("/api/upload/multi2")
    public ResponseEntity<?> uploadFiles2(
            @ModelAttribute UploadModel model) {
        //...
    }

3. POST + JSON

To POST with JSON data, add this -H "Content-Type: application/json"

3.1 On Windows, escape the double quotes


c:\> curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d {\"username\":\"mkyong\",\"password\":\"abc\"} http://localhost:8080/api/login/

3.2 For *nix or Mac OSX, add a single quote


$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"username":"mkyong","password":"abc"}' http://localhost:8080/api/login/

3.3 Spring REST to accept POST JSON data.


    @PostMapping("/api/login")
    public ResponseEntity<?> login(@RequestBody Login login) {
        //..
    }

References

  1. cURL official website
  2. Wikipedia – cURL
  3. Building REST services with Spring
  4. cURL – Post JSON data to Spring REST
  5. Spring Boot file upload example – Ajax and REST

About Author

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Founder of Mkyong.com, love Java and open source stuff. Follow him on Twitter. If you like my tutorials, consider make a donation to these charities.

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Preety
7 years ago

alert(“awesome articles”)

Sean
3 years ago

I’m brand new to everything web (java, Spring Boot, etc.) and I’m struggling a little with this example – namely, I’m getting a 404 error when I attempt to upload the file using cURL. Here’s the command line dump:

>curl -F file=@”./thumbsUpEmoji.png” http://localhost:8080/api/upload
{“timestamp”:”2020-04-16T13:48:37.951+0000″,”status”:404,”error”:”Not Found”,”message”:”No message available”,”path”:”/api/upload”}

And I copied the example code above (the one for the “/api/upload”) into my Rest Controller class. I have other mappings/functions in that same controller (mostly request mappings) and those all work when I fire up the server, so I think most things are working correctly, I’m just not able to upload a file.

Any thoughts?

Lilly
4 years ago

Thank you for this tutorial, please is it possible to combine a POST + JSON + array params? it will be like Multipart?

ha
5 years ago

hi kyong,

I am not a java developer but just testing a bit with REST API commands such us POST GET PUT and I wonder what should be the directives I need to modify/config in the http.conf file so I can enable/allow writing files to the webserver using the PUT command.. if you can please give me a example would be great… thanks in advance….

Borgy Manotoy
6 years ago

Nice! Is it possible to have a json POST with multiple files inside? Example: { “ticketId”: “1”, “ticketCode”: “ABC123”, “attachments”: [ FILES_HERE ] }? Thanks