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!