http: RESTful Client

The http extension allows you to call RESTful endpoints within Postgres.

Quick demo#

Overview#

Let's cover some basic concepts:

• REST: stands for REpresentational State Transfer. It's simply a way to request data from external services.
• RESTful APIs are servers which accept HTTP "calls". The calls are typically:
  • GET − Read only access to a resource.
  • POST − Creates a new resource.
  • DELETE − Removes a resource.
  • PUT − Updates an existing resource or creates a new resource.

You can use the http extension to make these network requests from Postgres.

Usage#

Enable the extension#

Available functions#

While the main usage is simply http('http_request'), there are 5 wrapper functions for specific functionality:

• http_get()
• http_post()
• http_put()
• http_delete()
• http_head()

Returned values#

A successful call to a web URL from the http extension returns a record with the following fields:

• status: integer
• content_type: character varying
• headers: http_header[]
• content: character varying. Typically you would want to cast this to jsonb using the format content::jsonb

Examples#

Simple GET example#

select
  "status", "content"::jsonb
from
  http_get('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1');

Simple POST example#

select
  "status", "content"::jsonb
from
  http_post(
    'https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts',
    '{ "title": "foo", "body": "bar", "userId": 1 }',
    'application/json'
  );

Resources#

• Official http GitHub Repository