Curl cheat sheet, for web developement

HTTP Request

Specify Method by -X

Form:

curl -X <METHOD> <URI>

By default, it uses GET method

curl https://www.google.com/

# same as 
curl -X GET https://www.google.com/

Use Post simply by:

curl -X POST https://www.example.com/

GET

Get entire document of the website in terminal

curl https://www.google.com/

POST

curl -X POST https://example.com/

More complex, pass data, -d and header -H to server. Below shows POST with json body

curl -d '{"option": "value", "something": "anothervalue"}' \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \ 
-X POST https://example.com/

HTTP Headers

Inspect all details of header by --verbose

curl -v https://www.google.com/

# same as 
curl -verbose https://www.google.com/

Only see the header by -I

curl -I https://www.google.com/

Get the body along with response header with -i

It’s similar to --verbose but contains less.

Response header is usually omitted. Use -i to include it

# full name
curl -include https://www.google.com/
curl -i https://www.google.com/

Set referer

An HTTP request may include a ‘referer’ field (yes it is misspelled), which can be used to tell from which URL the client got to this particular resource.

curl --referer http://I.come.here http://www.example.com

Set User-agnet

curl --user-agent "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)" [URL]

Store the response to a file, like wget

With its origin file name

curl -O https://derry.club/index.html

Give a new name

curl -o output.html https://derry.club/