cURL: POST/Upload multi part form
I’ve been doing some work which involved uploading a couple of files from a HTML form and I wanted to check that the server side code was working by executing a cURL command rather than using the browser.
The form looks like this:
<form action="http://foobar.com" method="POST" enctype="multipart/form-data">
<p>
<label for="nodes">File 1:</label>
<input type="file" name="file1" id="file1">
</p>
<p>
<label for="relationships">File 2:</label>
<input type="file" name="file2" id="file2">
</p>
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit">
</form>If we convert the POST request from the browser into a cURL equivalent we end up with the following:
curl 'http://foobar.com' -H 'Origin: null' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch' -H 'Host: foobar.com:7474' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.95 Safari/537.36' -H 'Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----WebKitFormBoundaryMxYFIg6GFEIPAe6V' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'Cache-Control: max-age=0' -H 'Cookie: splashShown1.6=1; undefined=0; _mkto_trk=id:773-GON-065&token:_mch-localhost-1373821432078-37666; JSESSIONID=123cbkxby1rtcj3dwipqzs7yu' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --data-binary $'------WebKitFormBoundaryMxYFIg6GFEIPAe6V\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="file1"; filename="file1.csv"\r\nContent-Type: text/csv\r\n\r\n\r\n------WebKitFormBoundaryMxYFIg6GFEIPAe6V\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="file2"; filename="file2.csv"\r\nContent-Type: text/csv\r\n\r\n\r\n------WebKitFormBoundaryMxYFIg6GFEIPAe6V\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="submit"\r\n\r\nSubmit\r\n------WebKitFormBoundaryMxYFIg6GFEIPAe6V--\r\n' --compressedI tried executing this command but I couldn’t quite get it to work, and in any case it seemed extremely complicated. Thankfully, I came across a cURL tutorial which described a much simpler alternative which does work:
curl --form file1=@file1.csv --form file2=@file2.csv --form press=submit http://foobar.comI knew it couldn’t be that complicated!
About the author
I'm currently working on short form content at ClickHouse. I publish short 5 minute videos showing how to solve data problems on YouTube @LearnDataWithMark. I previously worked on graph analytics at Neo4j, where I also co-authored the O'Reilly Graph Algorithms Book with Amy Hodler.