cURL is an open source command line application tool that allows you to transfer data on HTTP, HTTP/2, FTP and many others. It is used by computers, cell phones, cars, tablets, IoT devices and many more.
On this article we are going to focus on using cURL to troubleshoot websites only.
Installation
Depending on the OS that you have the directions might be different so check your OS below:
cURL on Mac OS
You are very lucky. There is nothing to do, cURL is already installed with every Mac OS install and is available right from your Terminal or favorite SSH client (hint iTerm2).
cURL on Linux
Depending on the flavor of your Linux distribution below are the statements required to install cURL on your computer:
Debian, Ubuntu and similar
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install curl
RHEL, Fedora, CentOS, Amazon Linux and similar
sudo yum install curl
SuSe Linux
sudo zypper in curlArch Linux
pacman -S libcurl
cURL on Windows 10
First you need to install Ubuntu’s BASH on the Windows computer. After you have finished installing it, then you can simply run the following commands:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install curl
Completed, now up to something more interesting!
Examples of usage
Download a file from HTTP
curl -O https://salrocks.com/test.html
This command will download the file named test.html from the website salrocks.com. Below is an example for downloading the latest version of WordPress from their website:
curl -O https://wordpress.org/wordpress-4.9.2.zip
Partial downloads of document/pages/files
If you know your way around the terminal on Linux or MacOS computers, then you are most likely familiar with head and less which are to preview the first and last lines of a document. Well, cURL allows you to do just that. It comes pretty handy when there is a HUGE debug or error log that you need to see and you do not want to download the 1GB file. Use any of the examples below:
Getting the first 10 bytes and display them on screen:
curl -r 0-9 https://salrocks.com/error.log
If you want to send the output to file you can do something like this:
curl -r 0-9 https://salrocks.com/error.log > temp.txt
Pretty cool huh?
To Summarize
cURL is an extremely useful tool to use if you are a Developer, IT Pro, SysAdmin, Web Designer, etc; as it will help you to replicate requests done to servers without having to use a browser. It is extremely helpful when diagnosing issues with REDIRECTS and CACHING.
I am thinking of writing a tutorial about HTTP headers. What do you guys think?