Exploring HTTP methods and status codes

HTTP provides various HTTP methods. However, you are primarily going to use only five of them. To begin with, you want to have Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations associated with HTTP methods:

• POST: Create or search
• GET: Read
• PUT: Update
• DELETE: Delete
• PATCH: Partial update

Some organizations also provide the HEAD method for scenarios where you just want to retrieve the header responses from the REST endpoints. You can hit any GitHub API with the HEAD operation to retrieve only headers; for example, curl --head https://api.github.com/users.

Note

REST has no such requirement that specifies which method should be used for which operation. However, widely used industry guidelines and practices suggest following certain rules.

Let's discuss each method in detail in the following sections.

POST

The HTTP POST method is normally what you want to associate with creating resource operations. However, there are certain exceptions when you might want to use the POST method for read operations. However, it should be put into practice after a well-thought-out process. One such exception is the search operation where filter criteria have too many parameters that might cross the GET call's length limit.

A GET query string has a limit of 256 characters. Additionally, the GET HTTP method is limited to a maximum of 2,048 characters minus the number of characters in the actual path. On the other hand, the POST method is not limited by the size of the URL for submitting name and value pairs.

You may also want to use the POST method with HTTPS for a read call if the submitted input parameters contain any private or secure information.

For successful create operations, you can respond with the 201 Created status, and for successful search or read operations, you should use the 200 OK or 204 No Content status codes, although the call is made using the POST HTTP method.

For failed operations, REST responses may have different error status codes based on the error type, which we will look at later in this section.

GET

The HTTP GET method is what you usually want to associate with read resource operations. Similarly, you must have observed the GitHub GET /licenses call that returns the available licenses in the GitHub system. Additionally, successful GET operations should be associated with the 200 OK status code if the response contains data, or 204 No Content if the response contains no data.

PUT

The HTTP PUT method is what you usually want to associate with update resource operations. Additionally, successful update operations should be associated with a 200 OK status code if the response contains data, or 204 No Content if the response contains no data. Some developers use the PUT HTTP method to replace existing resources. For example, GitHub API v3 uses PUT to replace the existing resource.

DELETE

The HTTP DELETE method is what you want to associate with delete resource operations. GitHub does not provide the DELETE operation on the licenses resource. However, if you assume it exists, it will certainly look very similar to DELETE /licenses/agpl-3.0. A successful delete call should delete the resource associate with the agpl-3.0 key. Additionally, successful DELETE operations should be associated with the 204 No Content status code.

PATCH

The HTTP PATCH method is what you want to associate with partial update resource operations. Additionally, successful PATCH operations should be associated with a 200 OK status code. PATCH is relatively new as compared to other HTTP operations. In fact, a few years ago, Spring did not have state-of-the-art support for this method for REST implementation due to the old Java HTTP library. However, currently, Spring provides built-in support for the PATCH method in REST implementation.

HTTP status codes

There are five categories of HTTP status codes, as follows:

• Informational responses (100–199)
• Successful responses (200–299)
• Redirects (300–399)
• Client errors (400–499)
• Server errors (500–599)

You can view a complete list of status codes at MDN Web Docs (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status) or RFC-7231 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231). However, you can find the most commonly used REST response status codes in the following table: