You may be operating under the misapprehension that "POST" means "CREATE". It WOULD make a nice set with CRUD operations: POST - Create GET - Read PUT - Upd

You may be operating under the misapprehension that "POST" means "CREATE". It WOULD make a nice set with CRUD operations: POST - Create GET - Read PUT - Update DELETE - Delete But that's not actually how the HTTP verbs are defined[1]. Instead, my own mental mapping looks something like this: GET - read information. Must be idempotent and side-effect free so this one really IS just for reading. DELETE- delete. Usually pretty obvious except for arguments about whether a "soft delete" (mark as deleted but don't remove from the underlying DB -- like a bank account which can be closed but continues to exist (its account number, for instance, is never freed up). PUT - update things. Must be idempotent. If you're a stickler for doing things right, this should NOT be use for a "partial update" (where you supply a few fields and everything else is left "as is") but only for a "total update" (where the new thing you sent in replaces whatever was there). POST - "do it". Means to do the obvious thing (whatever that is for this URL). PATCH - great idea. Maybe in a few years support for it will be ubiquitous enough that we can actually start using it. If we DID us it, this would be the partial update variant of PUT. OPTIONS and HEAD - occasionally used at a framework level. You won't ever use it. everything else - don't use it. [1] - https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html