Testing REST API Calls using Curl

Representational State Transfer (REST) was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation. Fielding is one of the principal authors of the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification versions 1.0 and 1.1.

Since my current application is just a bunch of REST services, I needed to test these calls before publishing them. Unfortunately there were no good tools I could use to test these calls. I spent some time searching for scripts or apps that can make my life easier till I ran into this jewel somewhere on the web

You can just copy and paste this code into a file called apitest.sh and your good to go.

#!/bin/bash
AUTH="user:password"
BASE="http://example.com/"
METHOD=$1
DEST="$BASE$2"
XML=$3
 
# make sure args were passed
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
        echo "usage: ./`basename $0` HTTP-METHOD DESTINATION_URI [XML]"
        echo "example: ./`basename $0` POST "/accounts" \"<account><name>ed</name><email>ed@ed.com</email></account>\""
        exit 1
fi
 
# execute CURL call
curl -H 'Accept: application/xml' -H 'Content-Type: application/xml' -w '\nHTTP STATUS: %{http_code}\nTIME: %{time_total}\n' \
-X $METHOD \
-d "$XML" \
-u "$AUTH" \
"$DEST"
 
exit 0