CURL with SOAP

curl is a software designed to deal with HTTP protocol. When it comes to REST, we could send request quite easily with curl. However , although it is not straight forward you could use curl for sending SOAP messages too. This method could not used for day to day use, but it is very useful when it come to testing. If you need to test a service, it is more or less the same request send to server. First you need to get soap request into a file (say echo.xml) and then send it to the service URI.

curl -d @echo.xml -H "Content-Type: application/soap+xml;charset=UTF-8 " 
http://localhost:9090/axis2/services/echo

An advantage with this method is , you could deal with HTTP related things very easily. Say if you need to send additional HTTP header with soap request, you could do it with "-H" option.

curl -d @echo.xml -H "Content-Type: application/soap+xml;charset=UTF-8" -H "User-Agent:Apache Axis2/C"
 http://localhost:9090/axis2/services/echo

and will be able to do modifications to SOAP payload quite easily. (Need to edit echo.xml file only :) )