Example of REST file upload POST request?

Question

I'm trying to make a RESTful server in Erlang with Cowboy, and I'm having trouble due to the fact that I know nothing about HTTP requests. I can't find an example of a RESTful file upload request, only a normal one.

This works for a regular HTTP server (found in the Cowboy examples) to upload the file compile.sh, which contains git add * ; git commit -a -m "upload" ; git push:

POST /upload HTTP/1.1
Host: 169.229.85.167:8080
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----WebKitFormBoundaryd1YD0OADcYFcuL0v
Origin: http://169.229.85.167:8080
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Authorization: Basic cmltcm9jazpwYXNzd29yZA==
Connection: keep-alive
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/600.1.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1 Safari/537.85.10
Referer: http://169.229.85.167:8080/
Content-Length: 243
Accept-Language: en-us

------WebKitFormBoundaryd1YD0OADcYFcuL0v
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="inputfile"; filename="upload.sh"
Content-Type: application/x-sh

git add * ; git commit -a -m "upload" ; git push

------WebKitFormBoundaryd1YD0OADcYFcuL0v--

But if I send this request to a RESTful server, I get this response:

HTTP/1.1 415 Unsupported Media Type
connection: keep-alive
server: Cowboy
date: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 04:34:06 GMT
content-length: 0
content-type: text/html
vary: accept

Now, I may have done the RESTful server wrong, but I'm not sure. A lot of it is encapsulated in Cowboy, so I don't really know how it works. Is the request supposed to be different for a RESTful server?

Ross Taylor-Turner Ross Taylor-Turner · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-31T10:49:57

There isn't really a difference between a RESTful file upload request and a "normal one" if you're using a HTTP POST, it's a HTTP request either way.

As you're receiving a 415 Unsupported Media Type response, this very likely means your (RESTful) server does not Accept the multipart/form-data content type that you're POSTing. You'll want to look at what your RESTful server is able to Accept, you may be able to send an OPTIONS request to the same URL to discover this, or else inspect the server-side code.

Example of REST file upload POST request?

1 Answers