HTTP - Methods

The set of common methods for HTTP/1.1 is defined below and this set can be expanded based on requirement. These method names are case sensitive and they must be used in uppercase.

S.N.	Method and Description
1	GET The GET method is used to retrieve information from the given server using a given URI. Requests using GET should only retrieve data and should have no other effect on the data.
2	HEAD Same as GET, but only transfer the status line and header section.
3	POST A POST request is used to send data to the server, for example customer information, file upload etc using HTML forms.
4	PUT Replace all current representations of the target resource with the uploaded content.
5	DELETE Remove all current representations of the target resource given by URI.
6	CONNECT Establish a tunnel to the server identified by a given URI.
7	OPTIONS Describe the communication options for the target resource.
8	TRACE Perform a message loop-back test along the path to the target resource.

GET Method

A GET request retrieves data from a web server by specifying parameters in the URL portion of the request. This is the main method used for document retrieval. Following is a simple example which makes use of GET method to fetch hello.htm:

HEAD Method

The HEAD method is functionally like GET, except that the server replies with a response line and headers, but no entity-body. Following is a simple example which makes use of HEAD method to fetch header information about hello.htm:

POST Method

The POST method is used when you want to send some data to the server, for example file update, form data etc. Following is a simple example which makes use of POST method to send a form data to the server which will be processed by a process.cgi and finally a response will be returned:

PUT Method

The PUT method is used to request the server to store the included entity-body at a location specified by the given URL. The following example request server to save the given entity-boy in hello.htm at the root of the server:

DELETE Method

The DELETE method is used to request the server to delete file at a location specified by the given URL. The following example request server to delete the given file hello.htm at the root of the server:

CONNECT Method

The CONNECT method is used by the client to establish a network connection to a web server over HTTP. The following example request a connection with a web server running on host tutorialspoint.com:

OPTIONS Method

The OPTIONS method is used by the client to find out what are the HTTP methods and other options supported by a web server. The client can specify a URL for the OPTIONS method, or an asterisk (*) to refer to the entire server. The following example request a list of methods supported by a web server running on tutorialspoint.com:

TRACE Method

The TRACE method is used to eacho the contents of an HTTP Request back to the requester which can be used for debugging purpose at the time of development. The following example shows the usage of TRACE method:

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