Curl is one of the best utilities for HTTP based testing. So, naturally, it’s a great for REST based services which are built on top of HTTP.

If you want to do HTTPS testing but not validate the certificate use -k

For basic auth, use --user username:password

For a url form encoded post use -d "foo=bar". If you just want to test out a post, use an empty string like -d "".

For debugging, use -v

Here’s a sample command I regularly use with a combination of the options above.

curl -k --user admin:admin https://localhost:9443/bam/ -v
* About to connect() to localhost port 9443 (#0)
*   Trying 127.0.0.1... connected
* successfully set certificate verify locations:
*   CAfile: /opt/local/share/curl/curl-ca-bundle.crt
  CApath: none
* SSLv3, TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
* SSLv3, TLS handshake, Server hello (2):
* SSLv3, TLS handshake, CERT (11):
* SSLv3, TLS handshake, Server key exchange (12):
* SSLv3, TLS handshake, Server finished (14):
* SSLv3, TLS handshake, Client key exchange (16):
* SSLv3, TLS change cipher, Client hello (1):
* SSLv3, TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* SSLv3, TLS change cipher, Client hello (1):
* SSLv3, TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* SSL connection using DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
* Server certificate:
* 	 subject: C=US; ST=CA; L=Mountain View; O=WSO2; CN=localhost
* 	 start date: 2010-02-19 07:02:26 GMT
* 	 expire date: 2035-02-13 07:02:26 GMT
* 	 common name: localhost (matched)
* 	 issuer: C=US; ST=CA; L=Mountain View; O=WSO2; CN=localhost
* 	 SSL certificate verify result: unable to get local issuer certificate (20), continuing anyway.
* Server auth using Basic with user 'admin'
> GET /bam/ HTTP/1.1
> Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46YWRtaW4=
> User-Agent: curl/7.22.0 (x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0) libcurl/7.22.0 OpenSSL/1.0.0e zlib/1.2.5 libidn/1.22
> Host: localhost:9443
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2012 06:52:01 GMT
< Content-Type: text/plain
< Content-Length: 14
< Server: WSO2 Carbon Server
< 
* Connection #0 to host localhost left intact
* Closing connection #0
* SSLv3, TLS alert, Client hello (1):
My Sample Text