Gerrit Code Review - REST API Developers' Notes

This document is about developing the REST API. For details of the actual APIs available in Gerrit, please see the REST API interface reference.

Testing REST API Functionality

Basic Testing

Basic testing of REST API functionality can be done with curl:

  curl http://localhost:8080/path/to/api/

By default, curl sends GET requests. To test APIs with PUT, POST, or DELETE, an additional argument is required:

 curl -X PUT http://localhost:8080/path/to/api/
 curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/path/to/api/
 curl -X DELETE http://localhost:8080/path/to/api/

Sending Data in the Request

Some REST APIs accept data in the request body of PUT and POST requests.

Test data can be included from a local file:

  curl -X PUT -d@testdata.txt --header "Content-Type: application/json" http://localhost:8080/path/to/api/

Note that the -d option will remove the newlines from the content of the local file. If the content should be sent as-is then use the --data-binary option instead:

  curl -X PUT --data-binary @testdata.txt --header "Content-Type: text/plain" http://localhost:8080/path/to/api/

Example to set a Gerrit project’s description:

 curl -X PUT --user john:2LlAB3K9B0PF --data-binary @project-desc.txt --header "Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8" http://localhost:8080/a/projects/myproject/description

Authentication

To test APIs that require authentication, the username and password must be specified on the command line:

 curl --user username:password http://localhost:8080/a/path/to/api/

This makes it easy to switch users for testing of permissions.

It is also possible to test with a username and password from the .netrc file (on Windows, _netrc):

 curl -n http://localhost:8080/a/path/to/api/

In both cases, the password should be the user’s HTTP password.

Verifying Header Content

To verify the headers returned from a REST API call, use curl in verbose mode:

  curl -v -n -X DELETE http://localhost:8080/a/path/to/api/

The headers on both the request and the response will be printed.

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