PUT vs POST in REST

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/630453/put-vs-post-in-rest

by zengr • 15 years ago

127 23 15 years ago

gurraman• 15 years ago

This was a nice take-away for me: "PUT is idempotent".

alttag• 15 years ago

Yes, but I have the nagging feeling that it should say "PUT is defined as being idempotent, so it's the responsibility of the programmer to implement it that way." Some frameworks may implement it this way, which is good, but it's something to test for if we want to assume idempotence.

manojlds• 15 years ago

Old questions in SO, generate interest in HN? Isn't N supposed to be NEWS?

dsl• 15 years ago

At the risk of being down-voted by the HN-hive mind (this place is seriously getting as bad as reddit)...

There is a subset of developers in the valley who pride themselves on trying to build the perfect REST API. Arguing over things like PUT v. POST, laughing at people who have to use ?_method= hacks to get around corporate firewalls, and trying to pack as many query parameters into the path as possible. Things like this SO thread really get them excited, so its a magnet for upvotes.

The problem is, while technically correct, this is counter-intuitive to how you should be building an API. Unless you are going to be providing fully functional libraries in all the major languages, your number one goal is making it so damn easy your average contract programmer from Accenture (who often don't even know POST exists) could use it. Unless you have a compelling wealth of data hidden behind your API (Google, eBay, Amazon, etc.), or extreme user demand (Flickr, Facebook, etc.), you have to make the bar to entry as absolutely low as possible or you will never get traction.

gougify• 15 years ago

I agree, this post is a typical reddit post. HN should not allow people under a certain karma to post. This would prevent a lot of sh*t to be post. This would also maybe prevent some startups from launching their product on HN just because they know HN will drive a lot of people on their website.

danielh• 15 years ago

The problem with many articles about REST is that they revolve around the question how to make your API more RESTful, and rarely answer why (and if) it actually makes sense to do so.

I think that proper use of HTTP methods is one of the core ideas of REST, but I understand that one might have to take shortcuts like _method to satisfy real-life needs while calling it RESTful to satisfy the buzz-word hungry PHB.

Let's just agree not to do something like GET /foo?_method=DELETE

stoprock• 15 years ago

"this place is seriously getting as bad as reddit"

From the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

zengr• 15 years ago

I agree it's an old question, but the idea is to put up an interesting debate on HN, let people know what is the right way of doing things (in this case REST, which is a misunderstood topic).

We, as developers take some pieces of technology as granted, many of us might not understand the real use cases of usage of PUT vs POST.

I don't think HN is meant purely for "fresh news" but a place for meaningful discussions which matter.

PS: This was not a karma collection ploy by me. If I wanted karma I would go to reddit or stackoverflow. Not HN.

simondlr• 15 years ago

I think either way is okay. It depends on how you want to structure it. Most web APIs aren't entirely RESTful anyway. It is also important to note that a lot of hosting providers don't support other verbs than GET or POST (ie Low-REST) [1].

[1] http://www2008.org/papers/pdf/p805-pautassoA.pdf

arunoda• 15 years ago

I would love to match curd with rest and I dnt find any ptoblems after that.

Create - Put, Update - Post, Retrieve - Get, Delete - Delete

yesbabyyes• 15 years ago

It's common to use POST for creation and PUT for updates. PUT, as GET, should be idempotent.

div• 15 years ago

DELETE is idempotent as well.

GET and HEAD are not really "potent" as they don't cause state to change on the server (or at least shouldn't). So I usually prefer saying GET and HEAD are "safe".

The difference between safe and idempotent is:

- using an idempotent verb 0 or 1 times will have a different end state on the server.

- using a safe verb 0 or 1 times will have the same end state on the server.

ericmoritz3• 15 years ago

If you want to put HTTP methods in terms of SQL CRUD then think of it this way.

POST is like a INSERT on a table with a auto incrementing primary key, you insert the data into the table and the SQL server tells you what the data is identified as. When you POST to a web service, the web service tells you what the data is identified as.

   For SQL:

   INSERT INTO people (first, last) VALUES ("Eric", "Moritz");
   SELECT id FROM people WHERE first = "Eric" and last = "Moritz";

   For HTTP:

   > POST /people/
   > Content-Type: application/json
   > 
   > {"first": "Eric", "last": "Moritz"}

   < HTTP/1.1 201 Created
   < Content-Location: /people/1
   <
   < {"first": "Eric", "last": "Moritz"}

PUT can function like an UPDATE on a table using it's primary key. For instance:

   For SQL:

   UPDATE people set first = "Eric" where id = 1;

   For HTTP:

   > PUT /people/1/first
   > Content-Type: text/plain
   > 
   > Eric
   
   < HTTP/1.1 200 OK
   < Content-Type: application/json
   <
   < Eric

A PUT can also be used to create a resource:

   For SQL:

   INSERT INTO people (id, first, last) VALUES (1, "Eric", "Moritz");

   For HTTP:

   > PUT /people/1
   > Content-Type: application/json
   > 
   > {"first": "Eric", "last": "Moritz"}

   < HTTP/1.1 201 Created
   <
   < {"first": "Eric", "last": "Moritz"}

T-R• 15 years ago

Great description - sorry, I accidentally downvoted when I meant to upvote.

lhnz• 15 years ago

1. What do you do if you wish to hide a query from the HTTP access log? Normally I would use POST rather than GET, but if I wish to make my API restful I have to ensure that POST is for create, and GET is for read.

2. Does PUT data also not appear in the HTTP access log?

3. What do you gain from doing everything this way? There are a lot of developers that won't have any idea what all of these HTTP request codes and methods actually are.

Ramone• 15 years ago

Figure out how to log only what you want. Don't let your choice of an inflexible logging system affect your external API.

What do you get? Well many things, but specific to your inquiries: using GET tells the client of your API that the request is cache-able (for better performance -- a browser won't cache POSTs), and it tells that client that it's safe to call without unintended consequences. A search engine spider should be safe to just hit every uri via GET that it finds, because those are supposed to be read-only.

rhizome• 15 years ago

1. You don't. Standard practice is to log everything, and more than you think you'll need. If you don't want to see those queries, configure your log viewing process/facility to ignore them.

ericmoritz3• 15 years ago

With POST you're creating a resource within the resource identified by the Request-URI. The server is responsible for creating a URI for the new resource you created.

    POST /forum/http/
    
     - creates a new post into the HTTP forum

    POST /photogalleries/cats/

     - uploads a new photo into the cats photo gallery

With PUT the client knows the resource's URI. The client uses it to create or update the resource. The easiest why to visualize this is to think of a filesystem

   PUT /forum/http/post-vs-put

    - upserts a post identified by "post-vs-put" into the HTTP forum

   PUT /photogalleries/cats/smelly-cat

    - upserts a photo identified by "smelly-cat" into the cat's photo gallery.

rue• 15 years ago

To be precise, there's really nothing that you can determine from the resource you're POSTing to. A POST to /forum/http/ could create a new cat picture in /yaykittens/ for all we know.

It's meant to be a catchall method, used for anything the others don't specifically cover.

ericmoritz3• 15 years ago

I've often thought of creating a "Cult of HTTP" that goes door to door and hands out pamphlet versions of Chapter 8 of "RESTful Web Services" to web developers.

http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-development/web-ser...

technoweenie• 15 years ago

Include pamphlets of the Webmachine Decision Flow: http://webmachine.basho.com/diagram.html

mmahemoff• 15 years ago

Like this?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/421186578/

piggity• 15 years ago

And once you've agreed on PUT vs POST, you can start the arguments on PUT vs PATCH !

https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/348

PUT vs POST in REST

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