REST URI convention - Singular or plural name of resource while creating it

Question

I\'m new to REST and I\'ve observed that in some RESTful services they use different resource URI for update/get/delete and Create. Such as

• Create - using

Answer 1

Use Singular and take advantage of the English convention seen in e.g. "Business Directory".

Lots of things read this way: "Book Case", "Dog Pack", "Art Gallery", "Film Festival", "Car Lot", etc.

This conveniently matches the url path left to right. Item type on the left. Set type on the right.

Does GET /users really ever fetch a set of users? Not usually. It fetches a set of stubs containing a key and perhaps a username. So it's not really /users anyway. It's an index of users, or a "user index" if you will. Why not call it that? It's a /user/index. Since we've named the set type, we can have multiple types showing different projections of a user without resorting to query parameters e.g. user/phone-list or /user/mailing-list.

And what about User 300? It's still /user/300.

GET /user/index
GET /user/{id}

POST /user
PUT /user/{id}

DELETE /user/{id}

In closing, HTTP can only ever have a single response to a single request. A path is always referring to a singular something.