How to send POST with body data, headers, and HTTP params over the cURL command line?

Question

I found a lot of examples on how to use simple POST commands in cURL, but I didn't find examples on how to send full HTTP POST commands, which contain:

• Headers (Basic Authentication)
• HTTP Params (s=1&r=33)
• Body Data, some XML string

All I found is:

echo "this is body" | curl -d "ss=ss&qq=11" http://localhost/

That doesn't work, and it sends the HTTP parameters as the body.

Answer 1

HTTP "parameters" are part of the URL:

"http://localhost/?name=value&othername=othervalue"

Basic authentication has a separate option, there is no need to create a custom header:

-u "user:password"

The POST "body" can be sent via either --data (for application/x-www-form-urlencoded) or --form (for multipart/form-data):

-F "foo=bar"                  # 'foo' value is 'bar'
-F "foo=<foovalue.txt"        # the specified file is sent as plain text input
-F "foo=@foovalue.txt"        # the specified file is sent as an attachment

-d "foo=bar"
-d "foo=<foovalue.txt"
-d "foo=@foovalue.txt"
-d "@entirebody.txt"          # the specified file is used as the POST body

--data-binary "@binarybody.jpg"

So, to summarize:

curl -d "this is body" -u "user:pass" "http://localhost/?ss=ss&qq=11"