Sometimes you need to make a quick call against an api but may not have the willpower or time to crack open a script to get things done… When those moments hit just fall back on curl!

Send a json document to an API with basic authentication:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -u CLIENT_ID:CLIENT_SECRET \
     -X POST https://api.roflcopters.com/events \
     -d '{"name":"cool event"}'

The -u followed by the client_id:client_secret is what will format the request for basic authentication. If the response coming back is pretty long and/or in json format you may want to check and see if you have json_pp installed. If you are on Ubuntu this should be in there by default.

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -u CLIENT_ID:CLIENT_SECRET \
     -X POST https://api.roflcopters.com/events \
     -d '{"name":"cool event"}' | json_pp
 
# Should output in a nice format like this
#{
#   "created_at" : 2938420,
#   "updated_at" : 2938420,
#   "id" : 1,
#   "name" : "cool event"
#}

If you have an Oauth2 token and your curl supports it you can use --oauth2-bearer to set the header, this is a little different than the -u header that is created for basic authentication.

curl --oauth2-bearer="aBunch0fgarble" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -X POST https://api.roflcopters.com/events \
     -d '{"name":"cool event"}' | json_pp

Also, you if need to send post data the “normal” way you can leave off the -H header with content type and format your data with the application/x-www-form-urlencoded format:

curl -u CLIENT_ID:CLIENT_SECRET \
     -X POST https://api.roflcopters.com/events \
     -d 'name=cool event'