Send Requests to the API

You have several options for sending requests through an API:

• Developers and testers may prefer to use cURL, the command-line tool from http://curl.haxx.se/.

  With cURL you can send HTTP requests and receive responses back from the command line.

• If you like to use a more graphical interface, the REST client for Firefox also works well for testing and trying out commands, see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restclient/.

• You can also download and install rest-client, a Java application to test RESTful web services, from https://github.com/wiztools/rest-client.

Sending API Requests Using cURL

cURL is a command-line tool that is available in UNIX® system-based environments and Apple Mac OS X® systems, and can be downloaded for Microsoft Windows® to interact with the REST interfaces. For more information about cURL, visit http://curl.haxx.se/.

cURL enables you to transmit and receive HTTP requests and responses from the command line or from within a shell script. As a result, you can work with the REST API directly without using one of the client APIs.

The following cURL command-line options are used in this guide to run the examples.

Option	Description
-d	Sends the specified data in a POST request to the HTTP server.
-i	Includes the HTTP header in the output.
-H HEADER	Specifies an HTTP header in the request.
-X	Specifies the request method to use when communicating with the HTTP server. The specified request is used instead of the default method, which is GET. For example, -X PUT specifies to use the PUT request method.

Note If you have the tools, you can run the cURL JSON request examples with the following options to format the output from cURL: <curl JSON request example> | python -mjson.tool.

Copying and Pasting cURL Request Examples into a Terminal Window

To run the cURL request examples shown in this guide on Linux or Mac systems, perform the following actions:

1. Copy and paste each example from the HTML version of this guide into an ASCII text editor (for example, vi or TextEdit). You can click on the small document icon to the right of each request example to select it.

2. Modify each example with your required account information and so forth, as detailed in this guide.

3. After you are finished modifying the text for the cURL request example with your information (for example, your_username and your_api_key), paste it into your terminal window.

4. Press Enter to run the cURL command.

   Note

   The carriage returns in the cURL request examples that are part of the cURL syntax are escaped with a backslash (\) in order to avoid prematurely terminating the command. However, you should not escape carriage returns inside the JSON message within the command.

   Tip

   If you have trouble copying and pasting the examples as described, try typing the entire example on one long line, removing all the backslash line continuation characters.