Whenever you create services, you will need some way of testing them. So far, we have seen some examples of doing just that with curl. So, in this recipe, let's go a bit deeper and check out some options that you may find useful. Alternatively, you could opt for another tool, such as wget. For our purposes, both options are roughly equivalent, allowing us to do everything we need for RESTful services testing: they are scriptable, they can download things, and they can also send requests posting data, so what you use will be mostly a question of personal preference.
If you want to read more about curl, check out its site at https://curl.haxx.se/, or the source code at https://github.com/curl/curl. You may also be interested in Everything Curl, a book that details all there is to know about this tool, and which is freely available at https://www.gitbook.com/download/pdf/book/bagder/everything-curl—however, do take into account that it's over 300 pages long!