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Development Tools HTTP Basics GET and POST Requests in a Browser Using Forms for POST Requests

Posted by John Fowler
John Fowler
7,913 Points

Using POST requests to login

Can you use a POST request to login to a website like Facebook through something like telnet in the same way that the POST request was made in this video by filling out the browser form and clicking the submit button?

2 Answers

Alexander Nikiforov
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Alexander Nikiforov
Java Web Development Techdegree Graduate 22,175 Points
Alexander Nikiforov
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Alexander Nikiforov
Java Web Development Techdegree Graduate 22,175 Points

There is a program called curl, that is used a lot to do POST request from terminal.

I encountered that a lot, especially when using REST services.

For example, look here

http://superuser.com/questions/149329/what-is-the-curl-command-line-syntax-to-do-a-post-request

So If you really want to do it try, because Telnet is too interactive

And people will want to send POST requests using terminal, because it is faster, and because the command can be saved, and you don't need a browser, by clicking and entering stuff.

PS. In the link above there is also a curl request with password and login.

John Fowler
John Fowler
7,913 Points

That is super helpful! Thank you! I'm a beginner and am trying to use C# to programmatically login to a website and then web test, but first I'm trying to understand what is really happening when I make GET and POST requests from a terminal. Really appreciate this!

Sue Dough
Sue Dough
35,800 Points
Sue Dough
Sue Dough
35,800 Points

The other post is right mentioning curl. This is how I logged in to my old apartments wifi instead of going to the routers login page everytime through the command line. Here is an example

curl --data "txtLogin=myUserName&txtPasswd=myPassWord&btnLogin=Login" http://172.12.1.1/portal/user-auth.php

And I created an alias in ~/.bashrc to make it super easy

alias logmein='curl --data "txtLogin=myUserName&txtPasswd=myPassWord&btnLogin=Login" http://172.12.1.1/portal/user-auth.php'

So all I had to do was type logmein.

See the man page for more info

man curl

You can use the network tool in your browser to figure out what params are sent in the post request.

Some sites won't accept it but most will.