Send POST Request using wget

Interacting with web services and APIs often requires sending HTTP requests. Among the various tools available for this purpose, wget stands out as a versatile command line utility. It supports sending different types of HTTP requests, including HTTP POST requests. These POST requests are commonly used to submit data to a specified resource, such as submitting form data to a server or creating a new resource at an API endpoint. This tutorial shows how to send POST request using wget.

Simple POST request

To perform a simple POST request, use the following command:

wget -qO- --post-data "name=John&age=20" https://httpbin.org/post

The -q option suppresses the output of wget, making it run quietly, while -O- directs the response body to the standard output (usually the terminal) instead of saving it to a file. The --post-data option specifies the data to be sent in the request body.

In this example, the response you receive will be formatted in JSON, similar to this:

{
  "args": {}, 
  "data": "", 
  "files": {}, 
  "form": {
    "age": "20", 
    "name": "John"
  }, 
  "headers": {
    "Accept": "*/*", 
    "Accept-Encoding": "identity", 
    "Content-Length": "16", 
    "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded", 
    "Host": "httpbin.org", 
    "User-Agent": "Wget/1.21.2", 
    "X-Amzn-Trace-Id": "Root=1-6416c45e-47a4828a557d5fca764271d6"
  }, 
  "json": null, 
  "origin": "XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX", 
  "url": "https://httpbin.org/post"
}

JSON data

To send JSON data in an HTTP POST request, use the --post-data option to specify the data and the --header option to set the appropriate headers.

wget -qO- --header "Content-Type:application/json" --post-data "{\"name\":\"John\"}" https://httpbin.org/post

Save output

To save the output of the POST request to a file, use the -O option:

wget -qO response.json --post-data "name=John&age=20" https://httpbin.org/post