HTTP Methods (GET & POST)

An HTTP method is the type of action a request performs: GET asks the server for something (a page or data), while POST sends data to the server, such as a submitted form.

Learn HTTP Methods (GET & POST) in our free Flask course — a beginner-friendly interactive lesson with worked examples, a practice exercise and a quick…

Part of the free Flask course at LearnCodingFast — hands-on lessons with examples you run in your browser, plus practice exercises and a quick quiz.

In this lesson you'll let routes accept POST, read submitted form data with request.form , and handle GET and POST in one view function. Try each app locally with flask run .

Every request a browser makes has an HTTP method . The two you'll use most are:

By default, a Flask route only answers GET . To accept POST you list it in the decorator with methods=["GET", "POST"] . The app below allows both and reports which method was used by reading request.method .

When a form is submitted with POST, the values land in request.form , which works like a dictionary keyed by each input's name . Use request.form.get("field") to read a value safely — it returns None instead of crashing if the field is missing.

The app below shows a login-style form on GET and greets the user on POST after reading the username field they typed.

The form's method="POST" attribute is what sends the data in the body. Each input's name becomes the key you read from request.form .

GET requests can still carry data — in the query string , the part of a URL after the ? . Flask exposes those values in request.args . For example, a search box might link to /search?q=flask .

Finish a route that accepts a POST and reads an email field. Replace each ___ .

You submitted a POST to a route that only allows GET. Add methods=["GET", "POST"] to the @app.route decorator.

The field wasn't in the submission, so the dictionary lookup failed. Use request.form.get("x") instead, which returns None rather than raising.

Build a single route that shows a feedback form and processes it.

Lesson 4 complete — your app can receive data!

You now know the difference between GET and POST, how to allow methods on a route, and how to read user input from request.form and request.args . That's the foundation of every interactive web app.

🚀 Up next: Templates with Jinja2 — stop returning inline HTML and render real template files instead.

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