Sending HTTP PATCH Requests With curl

In this snippet, we are going to be taking a look at how we can send HTTP PATCH requests using the curl command line tool.

The PATCH HTTP verb is used for partial update endpoints. For example, if I just wanted to update a few of he values within an object, I would tend to use a PATCH request with the ID of the object I wish to update, and the underlying API would then take care of updating these values for me.

Sending a HTTP PATCH Request with Curl

The curl tool takes in a flag -X which allows you to specify the HTTP verb you wish to use for the request. In this case, we want to specify curl -X PATCH to signifiy this is an HTTP PATCH request.

$ curl -X PATCH http://api:port/api/v1/path 

Adding A PATCH Body

Now, typically we are sending data alongside the PATCH request to our API endpoint. In order to do this, we can use the -d flag in order to specify the data we wish to send:

$ curl -d '{"new": "value"}' -X PATCH http://api:port/api/v1/path

Specifying Headers With Curl

We can specify headers in our curl requests using the -H like this:

$ curl -d '{"new": "value"}' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -X PATCH http://api:port/api/v1/path