How to simulate POST request

Question

I m testing on Windows  trying to simulate POST requests  with different form variables  for load testing  I have tried all kinds of load testing software but failed to get it working   For GET requests  I know I can just put parameters behind the url  http   www example com id yyy amp t zzz  But how do I simulate a POST request   I have a chrome REST Client but I do not know what to put in the headers and data   Here s what I ve tried so far   class Program               static void Main string   args                         string viewstateid     wEPDwUKLTY3NjEyMzE4NWRkK4DxZpjTmZg RGCS2s13vkEWmwWiEE6v XrYoWVuxeg                string eventid    wEdAAoSjOGPZYAAeKGjkZOhQ aKHfOfr91 YI2XVhP1c pGR96FYSfo5JULYVvfQ61 Uw4pNGL67qcLo0vAZTfi8zd7jfuWZzOhk6V gFA hhJU2fx7PQKw iST15SoB1LqJ4UpaL7786dp6laCBt9ubQNrfzeO rrTK8MaO2KNxeFaDhrQ0hxxv9lBZnM1SHtoODXsNUYlOeO kawcn9fX0BpWN7Brh7U3BIQTZwMNkOzIy rv Sj8XkEEA9HaBwlaEjg                 string username    user1               string password    ttee                string loginbutton    Log In                string URLAuth    http   localhost login aspx               string postString   string Format  VIEWSTATE  0  amp EVENTVALIDATION  1  amp LoginUser UserName  2  amp LoginUser Password  3  amp LoginUser LoginButton  4   viewstateid eventid  username  password realm otp loginbutton                const string contentType    application x-www-form-urlencoded               System Net ServicePointManager Expect100Continue   false               CookieContainer cookies   new CookieContainer                HttpWebRequest webRequest   WebRequest Create URLAuth  as HttpWebRequest              webRequest Method    POST               webRequest ContentType   contentType              webRequest CookieContainer   cookies              webRequest ContentLength   postString Length              webRequest UserAgent    Mozilla 5 0  Windows  U  Windows NT 5 1  en-US  rv 1 9 0 1  Gecko 2008070208 Firefox 3 0 1               webRequest Accept    text html application xhtml xml application xml q 0 9     q 0 8               webRequest Referer    http   localhost login aspx                StreamWriter requestWriter   new StreamWriter webRequest GetRequestStream                 requestWriter Write postString               requestWriter Close                 StreamReader responseReader   new StreamReader webRequest GetResponse   GetResponseStream                 string responseData   responseReader ReadToEnd                Console WriteLine responseData               responseReader Close                webRequest GetResponse   Close

User · Answer

Dont forget to add user agent since some server will block request if there s no server agent   you would get Forbidden resource response  example     curl -X POST -A  Mozilla 5 0  X11  Linux x86 64  rv 30 0  Gecko 20100101 Firefox 30 0  -d  field acaca amp name afadxx  https   example com

User · Answer

It would be helpful if you provided more information - e g  what OS your using  what you want to accomplish  etc   But  generally speaking cURL is a very powerful command-line tool I frequently use  in linux  for imitating HTML requests   For example   curl --data  post1 value1 amp post2 value2 amp etc valetc  http   host resource   OR  for a RESTful API   curl -X POST -d  file http   host resource   You can check out more information here-  http   curl haxx se     EDITs   OK   So basically you re looking to stress test your REST server   Then cURL really isn t helpful unless you want to write your own load-testing program  even then sockets would be the way to go   I would suggest you check out Gatling   The Gatling documentation explains how to set up the tool  and from there your can run all kinds of GET  POST  PUT and DELETE requests     Unfortunately  short of writing your own program - i e  spawning a whole bunch of threads and inundating your REST server with different types of requests - you really have to rely on a stress load-testing toolkit   Just using a REST client to send requests isn t going to put much stress on your server     More EDITs  So in order to simulate a post request on a socket  you basically have to build the initial socket connection with the server   I am not a C  guy  so I can t tell you exactly how to do that  I m sure there are 1001 C  socket tutorials on the web   With most RESTful APIs you usually need to provide a URI to tell the server what to do   For example  let s say your API manages a library  and you are using a POST request to tell the server to update information about a book with an id of  34    Your URI might be   http   localhost library book 34   Therefore  you should open a connection to localhost on port 80  or 8080  or whatever port your server is on   and pass along an HTML request header   Going with the library example above  your request header might look as follows   POST library book 34 HTTP 1 0 r n X-Requested-With  XMLHttpRequest r n Content-Type  text html r n Referer  localhost r n Content-length  36 r n r n title Learning REST amp author Some Name   From here  the server should shoot back a response header  followed by whatever the API is programed to tell the client - usually something to say the POST succeeded or failed   To stress test your API  you should essentially do this over and over again by creating a threaded process   Also  if you are posting JSON data  you will have to alter your header and content accordingly   Frankly  if you are looking to do this quick and clean  I would suggest using python  or perl  which has several libraries for creating POST  PUT  GET and DELETE request  as well as POSTing and PUTing JSON data   Otherwise  you might end up doing more programming than stress testing   Hope this helps

User · Answer

Simple way is to use curl from command-line  for example   DATA  foo bar amp baz qux  curl --data   DATA  --request POST --header  Content-Type application x-www-form-urlencoded  http   example com api callback   python -m json tool   or here is example how to send raw POST request using Bash shell  JSON request    exec 3 lt  gt   dev tcp example com 80  DATA    email    foo example com    LEN   printf   DATA    wc -c   cat  gt  amp 3  lt  lt  EOF POST  api retrieveInfo HTTP 1 1 Host  example com User-Agent  Bash Accept      Content-Type application json Content-Length   LEN Connection  close   DATA EOF    Read response  while read line  lt  amp 3  do    echo  line done

User · Answer

This should help if you need a publicly exposed website but you re on a dev pc  Also to answer  I can t comment yet    How do I post to an internal only running development server with this      stryba    NGROK creates a secure public URL to a local webserver on your development machine  Permanent URLs available for a fee  temporary for free   1  Run ngrok exe to open command line  on desktop  2  Type ngrok exe http 80  to start a tunnel   3  test by browsing to the displayed web address which will forward and display the local default 80 page on your dev pc  Then use some of the tools recommended above to POST to your ngrok site   https   xxxxxx ngrok io   to test your local code    https   ngrok com   ngrok

User · Answer

Postman is the best application to test your APIs   You can import or export your routes and let him remember all your body requests      EDIT   This comment is 5 yea s old and deprecated  D Here s the new Postman App   https   www postman com

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