The HTTP interface lets you use ClickHouse on any platform from any programming language. We use it for working from Java and Perl, as well as shell scripts. In other departments, the HTTP interface is used from Perl, Python, and Go. The HTTP interface is more limited than the native interface, but it has better compatibility.
Send the request as a URL 'query' parameter, or as a POST. Or send the beginning of the query in the 'query' parameter, and the rest in the POST (we'll explain later why this is necessary). The size of the URL is limited to 16 KB, so keep this in mind when sending large queries.
When using the GET method, 'readonly' is set. In other words, for queries that modify data, you can only use the POST method. You can send the query itself either in the POST body, or in the URL parameter.
As you can see, curl is somewhat inconvenient in that spaces must be URL escaped.
Although wget escapes everything itself, we don't recommend using it because it doesn't work well over HTTP 1.1 when using keep-alive and Transfer-Encoding: chunked.
The POST method of transmitting data is necessary for INSERT queries. In this case, you can write the beginning of the query in the URL parameter, and use POST to pass the data to insert. The data to insert could be, for example, a tab-separated dump from MySQL. In this way, the INSERT query replaces LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE from MySQL.
You can use the internal ClickHouse compression format when transmitting data. The compressed data has a non-standard format, and you will need to use the special `clickhouse-compressor` program to work with it (it is installed with the `clickhouse-client` package). To increase the efficiency of data insertion, you can disable server-side checksum verification by using the [http_native_compression_disable_checksumming_on_decompress](../operations/settings/settings.md#settings-http_native_compression_disable_checksumming_on_decompress) setting.
You can also choose to use [HTTP compression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_compression). To send a compressed `POST` request, append the request header `Content-Encoding: compression_method`. In order for ClickHouse to compress the response, you must append `Accept-Encoding: compression_method`. ClickHouse supports `gzip`, `br`, and `deflate` [compression methods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_compression#Content-Encoding_tokens). To enable HTTP compression, you must use the ClickHouse [enable_http_compression](../operations/settings/settings.md#settings-enable_http_compression) setting. You can configure the data compression level in the [http_zlib_compression_level](#settings-http_zlib_compression_level) setting for all the compression methods.
Some HTTP clients might decompress data from the server by default (with `gzip` and `deflate`) and you might get decompressed data even if you use the compression settings correctly.
By default, the database that is registered in the server settings is used as the default database. By default, this is the database called 'default'. Alternatively, you can always specify the database using a dot before the table name.
You can also use the URL parameters to specify any settings for processing a single query, or entire profiles of settings. Example:http://localhost:8123/?profile=web&max_rows_to_read=1000000000&query=SELECT+1
Similarly, you can use ClickHouse sessions in the HTTP protocol. To do this, you need to add the `session_id` GET parameter to the request. You can use any string as the session ID. By default, the session is terminated after 60 seconds of inactivity. To change this timeout, modify the `default_session_timeout` setting in the server configuration, or add the `session_timeout` GET parameter to the request. To check the session status, use the `session_check=1` parameter. Only one query at a time can be executed within a single session.
You can receive information about the progress of a query in `X-ClickHouse-Progress` response headers. To do this, enable [send_progress_in_http_headers](../operations/settings/settings.md#settings-send_progress_in_http_headers). Example of the header sequence:
Running requests don't stop automatically if the HTTP connection is lost. Parsing and data formatting are performed on the server side, and using the network might be ineffective.
The HTTP interface allows passing external data (external temporary tables) for querying. For more information, see the section "External data for query processing".
You can enable response buffering on the server side. The `buffer_size` and `wait_end_of_query` URL parameters are provided for this purpose.
`buffer_size` determines the number of bytes in the result to buffer in the server memory. If the result body is larger than this threshold, the buffer is written to the HTTP channel, and the remaining data is sent directly to the HTTP channel.
To ensure that the entire response is buffered, set `wait_end_of_query=1`. In this case, the data that is not stored in memory will be buffered in a temporary server file.
Use buffering to avoid situations where a query processing error occurred after the response code and HTTP headers were sent to the client. In this situation, an error message is written at the end of the response body, and on the client side, the error can only be detected at the parsing stage.
You can create a query with parameters and pass values for them from the corresponding HTTP request parameters. For more information, see [Queries with Parameters for CLI](cli.md#cli-queries-with-parameters).
