DEV Community: Sai Karthik

HTTP Methods, Status Codes and their meaning

Sai Karthik — Sun, 20 Dec 2020 16:43:10 +0000

Have you ever wondered what's the difference between GET and POST requests, or what does 404 Not Found means? You're not alone. Having a basic understanding of the different HTTP Methods and HTTP Status Codes is important when you're exploring and testing APIs.

HTTP Methods:

Below are some common HTTP methods. Let's discuss what each of them means.

GET:

GET method is used to retrieve data from a server at the specified resource.
GET is often the default method in HTTP clients

POST:

POST requests are used to send data to the API server to create or update a resource. The data sent to the server is stored in the request body of the HTTP request.
The simplest example is a contact form on a website. When you fill out the inputs in a form and hit Send, that data is put in the response body of the request and sent to the server.

PUT:

Similar to POST, PUT requests are used to send data to the API to update or create a resource. The difference is that PUT requests are idempotent. That is, calling the same PUT request multiple times will always produce the same result. In contrast, calling a POST request repeatedly make have side effects of creating the same resource multiple times.

PATCH:

PATCH is used for modifying capabilities. The PATCH request only needs to contain the changes to the resource, not the complete resource.
This resembles PUT, but the body contains a set of instructions describing how a resource currently residing on the server should be modified to produce a new version. This means that the PATCH body should not just be a modified part of the resource, but in some kind of patch languages like JSON Patch or XML Patch.

DELETE:

DELETE is pretty easy to understand. It is used to delete a resource identified by a URI.

HTTP Response Status Codes:

HTTP response status codes indicate whether a specific HTTP request has been successfully completed. Responses are grouped into five classes. Let's touch upon some most common HTTP response status codes from all these classes in this blog.

Informational responses (100–199)
Successful responses (200–299)
200 OK: The request was completed successfully.
Redirects (300–399)
301 Moved Permanently: The resource is permanently located in a different URI. A new URI should be given in the response.
302 Found: The resource temporarily moved to a new location.
Client errors (400–499)
400 Bad Request: The request could not be understood by the server.
401 Unauthorized: The request has not been applied because it lacks valid authentication credentials for the target resource.
403 Forbidden: User not authorized to perform the requested operation.
404 Not Found: The requested resource could not be found at the given URI.
405 Method Not Allowed: The request method is not allowed on the specified resource.
Server errors (500–599)
500 Internal Server Error: The server encountered an unexpected condition, preventing it to fulfill the request.
503 Service Unavailable: The server is temporarily unavailable, usually due to overloading or maintenance.
504 Gateway Timeout: The server is a gateway or proxy server, and it is not receiving a response from the backend servers within the allowed time period.

Further References:

Here are some resources where you can refer to more of these HTTP Methods and HTTP Response Status Codes.
MDN - HTTP Methods
MDN - HTTP Response Status Codes

What are Git and Github? Why are they used?

Sai Karthik — Sat, 19 Dec 2020 19:15:22 +0000

Have you ever wondered what Git & Github are, and why they are being used? Read on to know more about them!

Version Control System:

What is a Version Control System?

A system that helps us to maintain the different versions of our work and retrieve back whichever version is needed later.
Version Control Systems enable you to make periodic, manual “commits” to your project’s “repository” to save code as you go. Every time you commit, it goes down as a version of your project within the version control system. If you ever want to go back to an exact version of your project at a specific time, you’ll be able to do so just by using the commit you wish to revert to.
This makes it very helpful to fix mistakes without spending much time. A version control system is a powerful tool for both teams and individual programmers.

Git

What is Git?

Git is a type of version control system. It is widely adopted now by several projects.
It is a software tool that enables the management of changes to source code.

GitHub

What is GitHub?

GitHub is an online code hosting platform that integrates with Git to host your code online and helps in version control and collaboration.
It lets you and others work together on projects from anywhere.
Github lets you manage Git repositories.
Many large companies have their open-source projects hosted on GitHub.

Repository:

A repository contains all of your project's files and each file's revision history. You can own repositories individually, or you can share ownership of repositories with other people in an organization.
Your repository is everything inside of the .git folder in your project. It holds all the metadata for your project, such as references to configuration, description of your repository, as well as all of the major logs made to the project as a whole.

Branch:

Branching means you diverge from the main line of development and continue to do work without messing with that main line.
A branch is used to isolate development work without affecting other branches in the repository. Each repository has one default branch, and can have multiple other branches. You can merge a branch into another branch using a pull request.
Creating a separate branch that is either a working copy of the production branch or is completely different from it gives you the ability to leverage Git and work simultaneously with new features while one version of your software is in production.

Commit:

Commit is like a snapshot of your repository. These commits are snapshots of your entire repository at specific times. You should make new commits often, based around logical units of change. Over time, commits should tell a story of the history of your repository and how it came to be the way that it currently is. Commits include lots of metadata in addition to the contents and message, like the author, timestamp, and more.

Pull Requests:

Pull Requests are the heart of collaboration on GitHub. When you open a pull request, you’re proposing your changes and requesting that someone review and pull in your contribution and merge them into their branch. Pull requests show diffs, or differences, of the content from both branches. The changes, additions, and subtractions are shown in green and red.

Cheatsheets:

Github has provided these cheatsheets which contain commands and a quick glossary. They come in handy while working with Git and Github.
Git Cheatsheet - 1
Git Cheatsheet - 2