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#

Go to the Database page in the Dashboard.
Click on Extensions in the sidebar.
Search for "http" and 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

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