Testing a POST Request Using cURL

Using the following Pyramid application:

from pyramid.view import view_config

@view_config(route_name='theroute', renderer='string',
             request_method='POST')
def myview(request):
    print request.GET.items()
    print request.POST.items()
    print request.params.items()
    return 'OK'

if __name__ == '__main__':
    from pyramid.config import Configurator
    from paste.httpserver import serve
    config = Configurator()
    config.add_route('theroute', '/')
    config.scan('__main__')
    serve(config.make_wsgi_app())

Once your run the above application, you can test a POST request to the application via curl (available on most UNIX systems):

$ curl -d "param1=value1&param2=value2" http://localhost:8080/?param3=value3

You’ll see the following output on the application terminal:

[('param3', u'value3')]
[('param1', u'value1'), ('param2', u'value2')]
[('param3', u'value3'), ('param1', u'value1'), ('param2', u'value2')]

Note the relationship between the query string and request.GET. Note the relationship between the POST body values (provided as the argument to the -d flag of curl) and request.POST. Note that request.params is an amalgamation of request.GET and request.POST values.

For bonus points, here’s a simple Python program that will do the same as the curl command above does:

import httplib, urllib
params = urllib.urlencode({'param1': 'value1', 'param2': 'value2'})
headers = {"Content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
           "Accept": "text/plain"}
conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("localhost:8080")
conn.request("POST", "/?param3=value3", params, headers)
response = conn.getresponse()
print response.status, response.reason
data = response.read()
conn.close()