Today I learned

POST vs. PUT

As I was recently part of a team developing a RESTful API, I stumbled a lot about the differentiation between POST and PUT requests. I really tried to find clear definitions for both of these CRUD Operations.

After searching the whole Internet, my conclusion was:

"Both PUT and POST can be used for creating."

and

"POST should be used to create a resource, and PUT should be used to modify one"

and

"PUT should be used to create a resource, and POST should be used to modify one"

Great.

After searching some more I found this statement: "Better is to choose between PUT and POST based on idempotence of the action.".

Idempotence? What's that now?

Idempotence or an idempotent operation means it has no additional effect if it is called more than once whith the same input parameters. PUT is such an idempotent operation.

Here is an example:

If a user sends a PUT request twice because the network failed at first and nevertheless both request manage to make it to the server, that's not a problem.

If the same happens with a POST request, that can cause some bad side effects, like updating different parts of an object.

So updating something twice is bad and you're doing it with POST? Use PUT for that!

Other than that I'm still not 100% sure if I've understood the distinction of PUT and POST, but the idempotent example clears a few things up.

I keep coming back to this stackoverflow thread ↗ Opens in new tab where I think there is a lot of knowledge in there.

I hope you enjoyed this post and learned something new. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter ↗ Opens in new tab or via Email ↗ Opens in new tab.

If you want to support me, you can buy me a coffee. I would be very happy about it!

I wish you a wonderful day! Marco