multiple How to POST JSON data with Curl from Terminal/Commandline to Test Spring REST?

You can use Postman with its intuitive GUI to assemble your cURL command.

1. Install and Start Postman
2. Type in your URL, Post Body, Request Headers etc. pp.
3. Click on Code
4. Select cURL from the drop-down list
5. copy & paste your cURL command

Note: There are several options for automated request generation in the drop-down list, which is why I thought my post was neccessary in the first place.

For json data

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"params1":"value1","param2":"value2"}' http://localhost:8080/api

If you want to post some file

curl -X POST -F "[email protected]/Users/vishvajitpathak/Desktop/screen_1.png" http://localhost:8080/upload --insecure

In case you dont want to mess up with https and http:

OR Simply,

curl -X POST -F "[email protected]/Users/vishvajitpathak/Desktop/screen_1.png" http://localhost:8080/upload

Try to put your data in a file, say body.json and then use

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" --data @body.json http://localhost:8080/ui/webapp/conf

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.

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 -

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.

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

Create JSON file "MyData.json" and add content:

[
    {
        "Key_one": "Value_one",
        "Key_two": "Value_two",
        "Key_three": "Value_three"
    }
]

After this, you need to run following command:

curl -v -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST --data @MyData.json -u USERNAME:PASSWORD http://localhost:8000/env/add_server

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:

 [email protected]

This worked for me:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d @./my_json_body.txt http://192.168.1.1/json

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!

I use JSON in my application and its simple as :

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d '{"params1":"value1","params2":"value2"} hostname:port/api

But if you have a large number of params always prefer to use a file with the JSON request body as below:

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type:application/json" -F "[email protected]/users/suchi/dekstop/JSON_request.txt" hostname:port/api

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.

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

You need to set your content-type to application/json. But -d sends the Content-Type application/x-www-form-urlencoded, which is not accepted on Spring's side.

Looking at the curl man page, I think you can use -H:

-H "Content-Type: application/json"

Full example:

curl --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --request POST \
  --data '{"username":"xyz","password":"xyz"}' \
  http://localhost:3000/api/login

(-H is short for --header, -d for --data)

Note that -request POST is optional if you use -d, as the -d flag implies a POST request.

On Windows, things are slightly different. See the comment thread.