What is an HTTP request?

An HTTP request is a message sent by a client (for example, a web browser) to a server to request a resource or perform an action. It consists of:

1. Start line:
   • Method (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.)
   • Path to the resource
   • Protocol version (HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2)

   # Example of a start line for a GET request
   GET /index.html HTTP/1.1  
   

2. Headers:
   • Key-value pairs providing additional information about the request (Host, User-Agent, Content-Type, etc.)

   # Example of a request header
   User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36  
   

3. Request body (optional):
   • Data sent to the server (for example, form data in a POST request).

The server processes the request and sends an HTTP response.