HEAD Method

About¹

The HEAD HTTP method requests the metadata of a resource in the form of headers that the server would have sent if the GET method was used instead. This method can be used in cases where a URL might produce a large download, e.g. a HEAD request can read the Content-Length header to check the file size before downloading the file with a GET. If the response to a HEAD request shows that a cached URL response is now outdated, the cached copy is invalidated even if no GET request was made.

Characteristics

Syntax

HEAD <request-target>["?"<query>] HTTP/1.1

• <request-target>: identifies the target resource of the request when combined with the information provided in the

Host header. This is an absolute path (e.g. /path/to/file.html) in requests to an origin server, and an absolute URL in requests to proxies (e.g. http://www.example.com/path/to/file.html)

• <query> (Optional) - an optional query component preceded by a question-mark ?. Often used to carry identifying

information in the form of key=value pairs.

Examples

Successfully retrieving resource metadata

The following curl command creates a HEAD request for example.com:

curl --head example.com

This is equivalent to a GET request, except the server shouldn’t include a message body in the response. It creates an HTTP request that looks like this:

HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
User-Agent: curl/8.6.0
Accept: */*

The server sends back a 200 Ok response comprised only of headers. The response is effectively metadata that describes the resource of the resource itself (some caching headers are omitted in this example for brevity):

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date Tue, 06 May 2025 21:02:00 GMT
Content-Length: 1234567

Anki

Links

• HTTP method (HTTP verb)
• GET method
• OPTIONS method
• TRACE method

References