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.

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

Syntax

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

• <request-target>

  • : Identifies the target resource of the request when combined with the information provided in the 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>

  • : 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:

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

The server sends back the resource with a status code, indicating success:

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 -->

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• HTTP request methods

• HTTP response status codes

• HTTP headers

• header

• method