How to create REST URLs without verbs?

30 Aug 2013   | Programming

Tags:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1619152/how-to-create-rest-urls-without-verbs

General principles for good URI design:

  • Don’t use query parameters to alter state
  • Don’t use mixed-case paths if you can help it; lowercase is best
  • Don’t use implementation-specific extensions in your URIs (.php, .py, .pl, etc.)
  • Don’t fall into RPC with your URIs
  • Do limit your URI space as much as possible
  • Do keep path segments short
  • Do prefer either /resource or /resource/; create 301 redirects from the one you don’t use
  • Do use query parameters for sub-selection of a resource; i.e. pagination, search queries
  • Do move stuff out of the URI that should be in an HTTP header or a body

(Note: I did not say “RESTful URI design”; URIs are essentially opaque in REST.)

General principles for HTTP method choice:

  • Don’t ever use GET to alter state; this is a great way to have the Googlebot ruin your day
  • Don’t use PUT unless you are updating an entire resource
  • Don’t use PUT unless you can also legitimately do a GET on the same URI
  • Don’t use POST to retrieve information that is long-lived or that might be reasonable to cache
  • Don’t perform an operation that is not idempotent with PUT
  • Do use GET for as much as possible
  • Do use POST in preference to PUT when in doubt
  • Do use POST whenever you have to do something that feels RPC-like
  • Do use PUT for classes of resources that are larger or hierarchical
  • Do use DELETE in preference to POST to remove resources
  • Do use GET for things like calculations, unless your input is large, in which case use POST

General principles of web service design with HTTP:

  • Don’t put metadata in the body of a response that should be in a header
  • Don’t put metadata in a separate resource unless including it would create significant overhead
  • Do use the appropriate status code
    • 201 Created after creating a resource; resource must exist at the time the response is sent
    • 202 Accepted after performing an operation successfully or creating a resource asynchronously
    • 400 Bad Request when someone does an operation on data that’s clearly bogus; for your application this could be a validation error; generally reserve 500 for uncaught exceptions
    • 401 Unauthorized when someone accesses your API either without supplying a necessary Authorization header or when the credentials within the Authorization are invalid; don’t use this response code if you aren’t expecting credentials via an Authorization header.
    • 403 Forbidden when someone accesses your API in a way that might be malicious or if they aren’t authorized
    • 405 Method Not Allowed when someone uses POST when they should have used PUT, etc
    • 413 Request Entity Too Large when someone attempts to send you an unacceptably large file
    • 418 I'm a teapot when attempting to brew coffee with a teapot
  • Do use caching headers whenever you can
    • ETag headers are good when you can easily reduce a resource to a hash value
    • Last-Modified should indicate to you that keeping around a timestamp of when resources are updated is a good idea
    • Cache-Control and Expires should be given sensible values
  • Do everything you can to honor caching headers in a request (If-None-Modified, If-Modified-Since)
  • Do use redirects when they make sense, but these should be rare for a web service

answered Oct 25 ’09 at 1:20
Bob Aman