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PUT requests are intended to be idempotent, which is one of the things that distinguishes them from POST requests. This (in my experience) is most non-CS-backgr

PUT requests are intended to be idempotent, which is one of the things that distinguishes them from POST requests. This (in my experience) is most non-CS-backgrounded software developers' exposure to idempotence, but it actually has tons of value pretty much wherever you can apply it. The ability to (sometimes accidentally) do a thing twice and have it leave no unintended consequence is huge. UPSERTs can be idempotent as well. "If this doesn't exist, create it, and if it does, update it to match this state", implies that running it twice will leave no unintended side effects.

physicles 6y ago
In the last couple years I've come to realize that nearly all POSTs should actually be PUTs, sometimes with a client-provided uniqueness token in the URL (like a UUID) that becomes part of the newly-created resource's ID. Now that I think about it, all the situations where I'm fine using POST are also idempotent, such as changing an object's metadata (technically PUT or PATCH), or sending a batch of HTTP requests to an endpoint bundled as a single request.