Can a POST command (with a file attachment) be simulated via the terminal?

SergioQ has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a perl script that accepts a POST command from my iPhone app.

It has two params: userid and username as well as the data from a file it is sending.

Currently, for debugging (the perl script) I have to run my iPhone simulator, and go through a bunch of steps.

It would be awesome if there was a way to run my perl script from the server terminal, it would be a huge time saver. Obviously I can do it with just the username and userid, but the script fails without receiving the data from the file. And obviously that's where I need to do my debugging, the data from the file.

Is there a way to do this all from the linux terminal where my script is located?

Thank you

Comment on Can a POST command (with a file attachment) be simulated via the terminal?

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Re: Can a POST command (with a file attachment) be simulated via the terminal? by Corion (Patriarch) on Jun 05, 2024 at 06:13 UTC
If you want to run your script on some kind of server, you can automate the POST request via `curl`, `wget` or a Perl program. If you want to run the script as a CGI script from the command line, you can supply the parameters on the command line: `perl myscript.cgi userid=5378 username=Corion` [download] If you use some module other than CGI, please tell us which module you're using and also consider posting a relevant short self-contained example so we can easily try out and verify our approaches.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Can a POST command (with a file attachment) be simulated via the terminal? by Danny (Chaplain) on Jun 05, 2024 at 14:01 UTC
Alternatively, if you only need to debug what the script is doing with the data and not how it is getting the data, you can create a command line flag that tells the script to get the params from a file in whatever format you want to define. If the flag is set just populate the params from the file instead of CGI or whatever you are using. EDIT: You can already do this with a file and 'use CGI "-debug"' if your file has lines like param1=value1. script.pl < param_file.txt	[reply]
Re: Can a POST command (with a file attachment) be simulated via the terminal? by etj (Priest) on Jun 05, 2024 at 13:37 UTC
As an alternative to `curl` to actually doing it externally from the command-line, if your app uses Mojolicious then you can run it from the command-line more directly as over HTTP(s). To avoid XY-problem (my fingers tried to type XS there, which is a bit Freudian), I think you'll do best of all by having the file-handling in its own function, and automated tests to call that file-handling with various inputs and checking the results.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Can a POST command (with a file attachment) be simulated via the terminal? by The_Dj (Scribe) on Jun 09, 2024 at 14:11 UTC
Is your Perl script (1) listening to the network, or is it (2) a CGI script called by Apache? (1) What Library are you using to listen to the network, or are you using `Socket` directly? Or (2) What CGI library are you using, or did you just code it all yourself? (1) You can easily use netcat in server mode (or ksh has a built in web server, afaik) or roll a quick server in perl to feed your script the test data or (2) you need to use `set REQUEST_METHOD=GET` and `set "QUERY_STRING=userid=1234&username=testuser`* You may also need `set HTTP_COOKIE=sessid=sess_1`; then your script will think the web server is feeding it the data. *Note that on windows, you dont' want to close the `"`. cmd.exe is easily confused and will usually append it to your variable, causing annoying bugs	[reply] [d/l] [select]