How to send a POST request without any data, to check if that endpoint is up?

user_9567126 0
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I'm in the process of writing a testing framework for an application, and I am not allowed to update, delete, move, or basically do anything with the data used by this application. For GET requests I need to test this is no problem, but PUT, POST and DELETE methods that change data this obviously is not the case.

Is there any way to send a POST request without any body, and still get a response that shows the url can take a request? Or in other words, how can I show that a url that is a POST is up and able to take requests, without actually sending the POST request and changing something in the database? (unfortunately its not possible to add a test object to database and run requests on that).

I need to do this programmatically in either Java or C# as well.

rest
1 Answers

There is no general way to 'test' if a POST request will work.

Most servers will likely emit a 400 error for these endpoints, which doesn't tell you a lot.

The most standard way to see if something is able to accept a POST request at all, is probably by doing an OPTIONS request and using the Allow header in the response to get the list of supported methods.

There is no guarantee that this is going to be correct, but many modern frameworks do a decent job populating this list. This is likely going to give you the most accurate, but still imperfect results.

You should not send an empty POST request anywhere because it could have a meaning and you could make unexpected changes to a server. For this kind of introspection stuff, stick to the 'safe' methods.

user_809110
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