What is HEAD in the context of HTTP requests?

The HEAD HTTP method is similar to GET but without a response body. The server only sends response headers.

This is useful for the following tasks:

• Checking resource existence: You can verify if a resource is available at the specified URL without downloading it entirely.
• Getting resource metadata: You can obtain information about the resource (content type, size, modification date, etc.) before downloading.
• Debugging: Convenient for viewing response headers without downloading large amounts of data.

Example request and response:

HEAD /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 1994 08:12:31 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix)
Last-Modified: Tue, 15 Nov 1994 12:45:26 GMT
ETag: "375cd75-1e6-3e063234"
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 482