HTTP OPTIONS Verb

By Alan Richardson · Updated 2026-08-12

• OPTIONS - shows the verbs available on this url
• returns an Allow header describing the allowed HTTP Verbs

OPTIONS asks the server which communication options are available for the target URL.

In API testing we most often look for the Allow header, which should list the methods the server says are valid for that resource.

For example:

Allow: GET, POST, PUT

This can help us discover supported methods, but we should still test them. An API can have incomplete or misleading OPTIONS responses, and proxies or frameworks can add their own behaviour.

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HTTP OPTIONS Send Example

curl -X OPTIONS https://apichallenges.com/lists ^
--proxy 127.0.0.1:8888

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HTTP OPTIONS Request Example

OPTIONS https://apichallenges.com/lists HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: curl/7.39.0
Host: localhost:4567
Accept: */*
Connection: Keep-Alive

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HTTP OPTIONS Response Example

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 12:24:39 GMT
Allow: GET, POST, PUT
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
Server: Jetty(9.4.4.v20170414)
Content-Length: 0

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Common HTTP Status codes in response to an OPTIONS

• 200 - options were returned, often including an Allow header
• 204 - options were returned with no response body
• 404 - target url was not found

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