Is there an application which does HTTP PUT?

Question

Common HTTP operations are GET and POST -- e.g. GET is implemented by every web browser, and so is POST when the web page is a web form (e.g. with <input> and a Submit button).

What about PUT and DELETE though? I imagine these might be used to edit the static content (i.e. pages) of a web site. What application(s) provide/implement this functionality?

• With a UI -- i.e. not just an API
• Maybe little else (i.e. not necessarily a huge and multi-functional application)
• Maybe free (libre and/or gratis) and able to run on Windows?
• An application which could be used (without programming) by a non-technical end-user, not just an API used by other software e.g. JavaScript

I imagine it would be like FTP client software, except via HTTP(S) instead of FTP -- am I right?

Apologies for ask for such a basic (and maybe commonplace) thing, I find it difficult to Google for.

And this question -- i.e. "[http] put" -- doesn't seem to have been asked here before

Answer 1

The PUT (and DELETE) verb is used by the WebDAV protocol, so any WebDAV-compatible software fulfills your requirement. WebDAV support is widespread, for example every major OS supports it in its file browser, including the Windows Explorer.

(Additionally, there also exist extensions of WebDAV for managing contacts and calendar entries, e.g., GroupDAV, for which plugins for the major mail clients like Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook exist. And there is the version-control system Subversion, which is most commonly used over another WebDAV extension. So most mail clients and every SVN client would be an answer to your question of which software can use PUT. But these kinds of clients are not really useful for editing static website content.)

Answer 2

I'd recommend Postman for this.

• It supports all HTTP verbs, not just GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. Some operations might require HTTP headers to be set (e.g. for authentication) and it supports that too.
• You can supply a raw body for your request, or key-value pairs which Postman can transform into e.g. URL encoded form content.
• It has a UI.
• While it does offer additional functionality like collaboration, I'm using it myself just for basic functionality like grouping and saving requests.
• It's free and runs on Windows and a couple of other OSes.

Answer 3

Probably a bit lower level than you're looking for, but cURL largely meets your requirements.

• While it's primarily a library for use by other software, it has a command-line UI that's actually rather easy to use for most tasks.
• It's 100% FOSS (using a permissive license).
• It supports completely arbitrary HTTP request types. Obviously PUT and DELETE as requested, but also more exotic stuff like OPTIONS, TRACE, PATCH, and the various WebDAV extensions (and actually almost anything, provided it doesn't require encapsulating a connection inside the request).
• It's got a bunch of other useful features like direct support for most authentication types, specifying arbitrary request headers, providing sets of specific HTTP cookies with the request, HTTP/2, TLS, and a whole slew of other things (including an almost comical number of protocols other than HTTP).
• It's tiny (largely because it doesn't have a graphical UI).

Sample command to use PUT to upload a local file (doesn't do any authentication, but should work just fine with HTTPS):

curl -X PUT --data-binary @/some/local/file.txt -o response.txt https://example.com/file.txt

That will take the contents of /some/local/file.txt, use it as the request body for a PUT request to https://example.com, save the response to response.txt on the local system, and display a nice progress meter for the upload.

---

It's important to note that regardless of what tool you use for this, the web server has to support it. In most cases, this means that the administrator of that server has to explicitly enable support for it, but even then it's not always going to behave exactly the same on all servers.

Also, you probably want to look into WebDAV, it covers this, has good client-side support on all major platforms, and provides a lot more functionality (such as creating directories).

Also of possible interest is the HTTP PATCH request, which lets you upload a patch (in an unspecified format) to modify a resource in-place without having to re-upload the entire resource. Support for that though is even more shoddy than WebDAV or PUT and DELETE.

Answer 4

You can use restlet client also, it works on chrome as a extension.

• Free to some extent.
• Has open source framework.
• Support put and other http request.

References:

https://restlet.com/documentation/client/user-guide/introduction

Answer 5

Fiddler (free as in beer) is another tool commonly used for anything related to HTTP, including constructing/executing all kinds of requests. Primary usage is investigating HTTP traffic and testing one-off cases, not the best tool if you want to script some multistep operations (like "grab and upload local file" sample you have).

Note that browsers can execute all kind of requests with JavaScript including PUT and DELETE (See some sample on StackOverflow - How to send a PUT/DELETE request) - so if you have no extra tools you can stick with just browser and its JavaScript (but locations of services would be limited by same origin/CORS policy).

Answer 6

If you consider the browser valid for GET and POST, it is also valid for PUT and DELETE. Those are often used by JavaScript applications running in the browser to modify data on the backend server, e.g. when you place or update a comment