[http-post] How to simulate POST request?

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&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}&EVENTVALIDATION={1}&LoginUser_UserName={2}&LoginUser_Password={3}&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();

        }
    }

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&name=afadxx" https://example.com

Simple way is to use curl from command-line, for example:

DATA="foo=bar&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<> /dev/tcp/example.com/80

DATA='{"email": "[email protected]"}'
LEN=$(printf "$DATA" | wc -c)

cat >&3 << 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 <&3; do
   echo $line
done

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

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/

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&post2=value2&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&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!