Memorize curl commands (programming)

Josh · September 3, 2019, 3:18pm

I saw this curl cookbook and though it might be useful to memorize.

Make a POST Request (TLDR: Use -X POST argument)

Add POST Data to a Request (TLDR: Use -d var=val argument)

Construct a Query String (TLDR: Use -G argument)

Add HTTP Headers (TLDR: Use -H 'Header: Value' argument)

Change the User Agent (TLDR: Use -A 'User Agent' argument)

Set Cookies (TLDR: Use -b name=value argument)

Add a Referrer (TLDR: Use -e URL argument)

Follow a 3XX Redirect (TLDR: Use -L argument)

Use the Basic HTTP Authentication (TLDR: Use -u user:pass argument)

Print the Response Headers (TLDR: Use -i argument)

Use a Proxy (TLDR: Use -x protocol://host:port argument)

Ignore the SSL Certificate (TLDR: Use -k argument)

Make Curl Silent (TLDR: Use -s argument)

Save the Response to a File (TLDR: Use -o file argument)

Make Curl Slow (TLDR: Use --limit-rate 8k (8KB/sec) argument)

Debug Curl Requests (TLDR: Use -v or --trace arguments)

Make a GET Request (TLDR: No arguments required, it’s the default)

OldGrantonian · September 3, 2019, 7:43pm

I typed the following at a DOS command line:

curl https://artofmemory.com/

I got:

[moderator edit: raw html removed for readability]
C:\WINDOWS\system32>

I think there might be something strange at line 232 and maybe line 1,009, but otherwise things look fine.

Thanks.

I almost forgot to ask - what is it?

Josh · September 3, 2019, 7:55pm

curl is a tool for making web requests in the terminal or from other programs.

It can be used for testing URLs while building features or other programming tasks. If you use it like in your example, it will just return the raw HTML of a page.

Examples

This will give you the current position of the International Space Station:

curl http://api.open-notify.org/iss-now.json

(In the screenshot, I sent the output through a formatting tool called jq, but that isn’t necesary.)

Or you can programmatically get data about Star Wars characters like this (change the number for a different character):

curl https://swapi.co/api/people/1/

If you can run a command in the terminal, it can be used for automation. Here’s an example of using curl in a little shell script that finds the titles of all the movies that Darth Vader has appeared in.

[Sorry, I removed the raw HTML in your post, because it won’t display correctly in the forum.]

zvuv · September 4, 2019, 12:01am

My guess is that curl is derived from ‘command url’. Dunno. Very useful command.

I plan to tackle git.