HTTP Field Update

HTTP Field Update (HFU) is an extremely lightweight module for updating entity fields via HTTP requests. This is not a RESTful implementation and is not intended to be one. Its aim is to provide a very simple and quick way to do bulk updates or have an external system make quick, simple updates to an entity.

What it does:

It's pretty simple, HFU provides the following endpoint:

/hfu/<entity type>/<entity id>

To update a field on that entity, use query parameters in the form of:

?field_machine_name=value_to_set

For example:

http://localhost/hfu/node/123?body='This is some body text';field_some_taxonomy=42

would update node 123's body to the given text and set the term reference field to tid 42.

Authentication:

This module does not implement its own authentication, it relies on standard Drupal authentication. That said, there is nothing preventing it from using a different authentication method provided by some other module.

This may, at first, seem to be a problem for tools like curl since Drupal authentication is cookie based. There is a solution though, --cookie-jar.

Here's how that might work:

Get a login link with Drush:

drush -l http://localhost user-login myusername

Use the --cookie-jar flag to save cookie set on a curl request.

curl --cookie-jar cookie.txt <login link>

Then, you can use that cookie file to make subsequent authenticated requests to Drupal using curl.

curl --cookie cookie.txt http://localhost/hfu/node/123?body='This is some body text';field_some_taxonomy=42

This contrived example can be implemented a thousand different ways with a hundred different languages. However, I hope this give you a starting point to get something done.