HTTP Verbs in 60 seconds

Saul Feliz
2 min readMay 4, 2020

Your main RESTful methods in about a minute

Pop quiz: what are the most frequently used HTTP verbs?

GET

Reads data. If the URL ends in /:id, it retrieves one instance of that data.

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POST

Creates new data. Since you’re sending data, it needs to have headers and a body with that data.

PUT

Updates a specific record; if you try to update a record that doesn’t exist, it creates it.

PATCH

Like PUT, but instead of creating a new record if it doesn’t exist, you get back an error message.

DELETE

Photo by Matt Artz on Unsplash

Destroys a specified record.

HEAD

Like GET, but you only get back headers (e.g. status 200 “ok”).

OPTIONS

Returns header with all the options or methods allowed at that endpoint (e.g. PUT, GET, DELETE, CORS, etc.)

Quiz passed. With about 13 seconds left.

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