HTTP Methods Complete Guide

Overview

This guide serves as a professional field manual detailing HTTP methods, their semantics, and behaviors. It covers safety, idempotency, caching, authorization, status codes, conditional requests, retries, CORS, and practical API testing strategies. The content focuses on what each HTTP method means, how it should behave, how it fails, and how to test it correctly, aligning with RFC 9110 and RFC 5789. Designed for QA Engineers, API Testers, and SDETs, this handbook helps professionals understand and apply method semantics in API testing. It provides insights into standard and extended methods, common pitfalls, and specific testing considerations for each, including GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, OPTIONS, HEAD, and TRACE.

Table of contents

1. HTTP Methods - The Big Picture
2. The Core Standard Methods
3. Safe Methods
4. Idempotent Methods
5. GET - Retrieve a Representation
6. GET - Query and Filtering Patterns
7. GET - Caching and Conditional Retrieval
8. HEAD - GET Metadata Without Content
9. POST - Resource-specific Processing
10. POST - Creation and 201
11. POST - Commands and Actions
12. POST and Idempotency Keys
13. PUT - Replace or Set Target State
14. PUT - Create When the Client Knows the URI
15. PUT - Retry Safety

Preview from this resource

A short extract taken from the first 6 of 45 pages. The complete notes are in the QA Vault.

Who this resource is for

• API Tester