How to manually send HTTP POST requests from Firefox or Chrome browser

I want to test some URLs in a web application I'm working on. For that I would like to manually create HTTP POST requests (meaning I can add whatever parameters I like).

Is there any functionality in Chrome and/or Firefox that I'm missing?

Solution 1:

I have been making a Chrome app called Postman for this type of stuff. All the other extensions seemed a bit dated so made my own. It also has a bunch of other features which have been helpful for documenting our own API here.

Postman now also has native apps (i.e. standalone) for Windows, Mac and Linux! It is more preferable now to use native apps, read more here.

Solution 2:

CURL is awesome to do what you want! It's a simple, but effective, command line tool.

REST implementation test commands:

curl -i -X GET http://rest-api.io/items
curl -i -X GET http://rest-api.io/items/5069b47aa892630aae059584
curl -i -X DELETE http://rest-api.io/items/5069b47aa892630aae059584
curl -i -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"name": "New item", "year": "2009"}' http://rest-api.io/items
curl -i -X PUT -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"name": "Updated item", "year": "2010"}' http://rest-api.io/items/5069b47aa892630aae059584

Solution 3:

Firefox

Open Network panel in Developer Tools by pressing Ctrl+Shift+E or by going Menubar -> Tools -> Web Developer -> Network. Then Click on small door icon on top-right (in expanded form in the screenshot, you'll find it just left of the highlighted Headers), second row (if you don't see it then reload the page) -> Edit and resend whatever request you want

Firefox Dev Tools with button "Edit and Resent" highlighted

POST request body highlighted

Solution 4:

Forget the browser and try CLI. HTTPie is a great tool!

HTTPie screenshot

CLI HTTP clients:

HTTPie
Curlie
HTTP Prompt
Curl
wget

If you insist on a browser extension then:

Chrome:

Postman - REST Client (deprecated, now has a desktop program)
Advanced REST client
Talend API Tester - Free Edition

Firefox:

RESTClient

Solution 5:

Having been greatly inspired by Postman for Chrome, I decided to write something similar for Firefox.

REST Easy* is a restartless Firefox add-on that aims to provide as much control as possible over requests. The add-on is still in an experimental state ~~(it hasn't even been reviewed by Mozilla yet)~~ but development is progressing nicely.

The project is open source, so if anyone feels compelled to help with development, that would be awesome: https://github.com/nathan-osman/Rest-Easy

_{* the add-on available from http://addons.mozilla.org will always be slightly behind the code available on GitHub}