I’ve never been used HEAD method in HTTP. I even don’t know what is in the HTTP method list. Usually I only use GET and POST. I rarely use DELETE and FETCH. But other than that I don’t use anything.

But I had an issue. I got a RESTFul API for file storage. And at some point I needed to check if the file exists. It’s too much to GET all the payload of the file contents for checking if the file exists. I was thinking if I should introduce the new API, but it’s not RESTFul.

And here we are. We have HEAD method.

The w3 explains about HEAD following;

The HEAD method is identical to GET except that the server MUST NOT return a message-body in the response. The metainformation contained in the HTTP headers in response to a HEAD request SHOULD be identical to the information sent in response to a GET request. This method can be used for obtaining metainformation about the entity implied by the request without transferring the entity-body itself. This method is often used for testing hypertext links for validity, accessibility, and recent modification.

The response to a HEAD request MAY be cacheable in the sense that the information contained in the response MAY be used to update a previously cached entity from that resource. If the new field values indicate that the cached entity differs from the current entity (as would be indicated by a change in Content-Length, Content-MD5, ETag or Last-Modified), then the cache MUST treat the cache entry as stale.

from HTTP methods

Now I can just get the header with HEAD method and check if the file exists without downloading all the payload.