CURL redirection with PUT upon HTTP 301 (and Django)
2019/8/2
Tags: [ shell ] [ Today I learned ] [ wtf ]As part of my job, I'm currently coding a REST API in a Django-based server.
While doing some manual tests on what I wrote, I noticed that my PUT
requests contained no HTTP body, and I started to investigate on the
reason for it.
After hours of seeking without finding, and thanks to a colleague who stepped in with some help, the reason for it became clear.
First off, let's mention the old problem with paths terminating with
/. What is the difference between http://$host/x and http://$host/x/?
Well, it depends on who is answering your requests. If you work with
Django, not having a trailing / will end up in a 301 redirection towards
the same endpoint with a trailing /. This is probably the same with
other frameworks.
I'm using curl for my manual testing. As soon as I stumbled into this
behaviour I simply added the -L flag to my scripts, so I could
automatically follow the redirects even when I forgot the trailing /.
Then I implemented the PUT method for the endpoint I was focusing on, and
while verifying it to be working as intended I found that the request body
was empty. Not only that, but even the PUT method of other endpoints
(implemented by my colleagues) seemed to have the same issue.
It turns out that curl is just dropping the body, and that it is not a
bug, it is a feature.
That's how I got to know about the --post301, --post302 and --post303
options in curl.