How to manually send HTTP POST requests from Firefox or Chrome browser?

CURL is awesome to do what you want! It's a simple, but effective, command line tool.

REST implementation test commands:

curl -i -X GET http://rest-api.io/items
curl -i -X GET http://rest-api.io/items/5069b47aa892630aae059584
curl -i -X DELETE http://rest-api.io/items/5069b47aa892630aae059584
curl -i -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"name": "New item", "year": "2009"}' http://rest-api.io/items
curl -i -X PUT -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"name": "Updated item", "year": "2010"}' http://rest-api.io/items/5069b47aa892630aae059584

Firefox

Open Network panel in Developer Tools by pressing Ctrl+Shift+E or by going Menubar -> Tools -> Web Developer -> Network. Then Click on small door icon on top-right (in expanded form in the screenshot, you'll find it just left of the highlighted Headers), second row (if you don't see it then reload the page) -> Edit and resend whatever request you want

Firefox Dev Tools with button "Edit and Resent" highlighted

POST request body highlighted


I have been making a Chrome app called Postman for this type of stuff. All the other extensions seemed a bit dated so made my own. It also has a bunch of other features which have been helpful for documenting our own API here.


Postman now also has native apps (i.e. standalone) for Windows, Mac and Linux! It is more preferable now to use native apps, read more here.