GET request method

The GET HTTP method requests a representation of the specified resource. Requests using GET should only be used to request data and shouldn't contain a body.

[!NOTE] The semantics of sending a message body in GET requests are undefined. Some servers may reject the request with a 4XX client error response.

<table class="properties"> <tbody> <tr> <th scope="row">Request has body</th> <td>No</td> </tr> <tr> <th scope="row">Successful response has body</th> <td>Yes</td> </tr> <tr> <th scope="row">{{Glossary("Safe/HTTP", "Safe")}}</th> <td>Yes</td> </tr> <tr> <th scope="row">{{Glossary("Idempotent")}}</th> <td>Yes</td> </tr> <tr> <th scope="row">{{Glossary("Cacheable")}}</th> <td>Yes</td> </tr> <tr> <th scope="row">Allowed in HTML forms</th> <td>Yes</td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

Syntax

http

GET <request-target>["?"<query>] HTTP/1.1

<request-target>
- : Identifies the target resource of the request when combined with the information provided in the {{HTTPHeader("Host")}} header. This is an absolute path (e.g., /path/to/file.html) in requests to an origin server, and an absolute URL in requests to proxies (e.g., http://www.example.com/path/to/file.html).
<query> {{optional_inline}}
- : An optional query component preceded by a question-mark ?. Often used to carry identifying information in the form of key=value pairs.

Examples

Successfully retrieving a resource

The following GET request asks for the resource at example.com/contact:

http

GET /contact HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
User-Agent: curl/8.6.0
Accept: */*

The server sends back the resource with a {{HTTPStatus("200", "200 OK")}} status code, indicating success:

http

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2024 14:18:33 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 07:18:26 GMT
Content-Length: 1234

<!doctype html>
<!-- HTML content follows -->

Syntax

Examples

Successfully retrieving a resource

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also