Testing a POST request using cURL

Using the following Pyramid application:

from wsgiref.simple_server import make_server
from pyramid.view import view_config
from pyramid.config import Configurator

@view_config(route_name='theroute', renderer='json',
             request_method='POST')
def myview(request):
    return {'POST': request.POST.items()}

if __name__ == '__main__':
    config = Configurator()
    config.add_route('theroute', '/')
    config.scan()
    app = config.make_wsgi_app()
    server = make_server('0.0.0.0', 6543, app)
    print server.base_environ
    server.serve_forever()

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

$ python application.py
{'CONTENT_LENGTH': '', 'SERVER_NAME': 'Latitude-XT2', 'GATEWAY_INTERFACE': 'CGI/1.1',
 'SCRIPT_NAME': '', 'SERVER_PORT': '6543', 'REMOTE_HOST': ''}

To access POST request body values (provided as the argument to the -d flag of curl) use request.POST.

$ curl -i -d "param1=value1&param2=value2" http://localhost:6543/
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 09:34:27 GMT
Server: WSGIServer/0.1 Python/2.7.5+
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 54

{"POST": [["param1", "value1"], ["param2", "value2"]]}

To access QUERY_STRING parameters as well, use request.GET.

@view_config(route_name='theroute', renderer='json',
             request_method='POST')
def myview(request):
    return {'GET':request.GET.items(),
            'POST':request.POST.items()}

Append QUERY_STRING parameters to previously used URL and query with curl.

$ curl -i -d "param1=value1&param2=value2" http://localhost:6543/?param3=value3
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 09:39:53 GMT
Server: WSGIServer/0.1 Python/2.7.5+
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 85

{"POST": [["param1", "value1"], ["param2", "value2"]], "GET": [["param3", "value3"]]}

Use request.params to have access to dictionary-like object containing both the parameters from the query string and request body.

@view_config(route_name='theroute', renderer='json',
             request_method='POST')
def myview(request):
    return {'GET':request.GET.items(),
            'POST':request.POST.items(),
            'PARAMS':request.params.items()}

Another request with curl.

$ curl -i -d "param1=value1&param2=value2" http://localhost:6543/?param3=value3
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 09:53:16 GMT
Server: WSGIServer/0.1 Python/2.7.5+
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 163

{"POST": [["param1", "value1"], ["param2", "value2"]],
 "PARAMS": [["param3", "value3"], ["param1", "value1"], ["param2", "value2"]],
 "GET": [["param3", "value3"]]}

Here's a simple Python program that will do the same as the curl command above does.

import httplib
import urllib
from contextlib import closing

with closing(httplib.HTTPConnection("localhost", 6543)) as conn:
    headers = {"Content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}
    params = urllib.urlencode({'param1': 'value1', 'param2': 'value2'})
    conn.request("POST", "?param3=value3", params, headers)
    response = conn.getresponse()
    print response.getheaders()
    print response.read()

Running this program on a console.

$ python request.py
[('date', 'Tue, 09 Sep 2014 10:18:46 GMT'), ('content-length', '163'), ('content-type', 'application/json; charset=UTF-8'), ('server', 'WSGIServer/0.1 Python/2.7.5+')]
{"POST": [["param2", "value2"], ["param1", "value1"]], "PARAMS": [["param3", "value3"], ["param2", "value2"], ["param1", "value1"]], "GET": [["param3", "value3"]]}