curl: methods, follow redirects, response headers, response time, multipart upload, authentication… and more

3 min readJan 6, 2021

Basic usage: simple GET method

This will make a GET request to the given URL and print response to stdout.

$ curl https://example.com

Ignore invalid and self-signed SSL connection errors with curl

Use -k or --insecure option

$ curl -k https://domain-with-insecure-ssl.com

Print response headers

Use -i option to print response headers and the response itself, -I option to omit the response and print response headers only.

$ curl -I https://example.com

Sample response:

HTTP/2 200
accept-ranges: bytes
age: 135602
cache-control: max-age=604800
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
date: Wed, 06 Jan 2021 07:16:58 GMT
etag: "3147526947"
expires: Wed, 13 Jan 2021 07:16:58 GMT
last-modified: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 07:18:26 GMT
server: ECS (oxr/8310)
x-cache: HIT
content-length: 1256

Print payload size and response time

For this, we need a custom output template. First, create a template file, curl-format.txt for example, with following content:

        size_request:  %{size_request} bytes\n
         size_upload:  %{size_upload} bytes\n
       size_download:  %{size_download} bytes\n
         size_header:  %{size_header} bytes\n     time_namelookup:  %{time_namelookup}s\n
        time_connect:  %{time_connect}s\n
     time_appconnect:  %{time_appconnect}s\n
    time_pretransfer:  %{time_pretransfer}s\n
       time_redirect:  %{time_redirect}s\n
  time_starttransfer:  %{time_starttransfer}s\n
                     ----------\n
          time_total:  %{time_total}s\n

Then using -w option to specify output format, as following:

$ curl -w "@curl-format.txt" example.com

Sample output:

        size_request:  76 bytes
         size_upload:  0 bytes
       size_download:  0 bytes
         size_header:  351 bytes
     time_namelookup:  0.001756s
        time_connect:  0.236285s
     time_appconnect:  0.000000s
    time_pretransfer:  0.236358s
       time_redirect:  0.000000s
  time_starttransfer:  0.478430s
                     ----------
          time_total:  0.478695s

Follow redirects

It’s extremely common for HTTP servers to return a 301 or 302 redirect for a given URL. One common example of this is to redirect your browser from an HTTP URL to HTTPS, like http://ucode.vn to https://ucode.vn.

$ curl -i ucode.vn

And we can see HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently code:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2021 07:31:13 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 178
Connection: keep-alive
Location: https://ucode.vn/<html>
<head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)</center>
</body>
</html>

Running curl command with -L or --location options will automatically handle any 3XX redirects and will retrieve whatever data is returned by the resulting URL.

$ curl -I -L ucode.vn

and we can see:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2021 07:33:53 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 178
Connection: keep-alive
Location: https://ucode.vn/HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2021 07:33:53 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 85913
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: Express
Set-Cookie: UCODE_LOCALE=vi; Path=/; Expires=Thu, 06 Jan 2022 07:33:53 GMT; SameSite=Lax
Set-Cookie: UCODE_PRODUCTION_IDE_CONFIGS=%7B%22theme%22%3A%22dark%22%2C%22layout%22%3A%22vertical%22%2C%22language%22%3A%7B%22id%22%3A%22python%22%2C%22name%22%3A%22Python%20(Interactive)%22%7D%7D; Path=/
Set-Cookie: UCODE_LOCALE=vi; Max-Age=2592000; Path=/
ETag: "14f99-LowxBo/SA1VGY9E29rvOz4t6Zck"
Accept-Ranges: none
Vary: Accept-Encoding

Making a POST request

Useful options:

Request method: -X POST
Content-type header: -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" (default) or -H "Content-Type: application/json"
Form url-encoded data: -d "param1=value1&param2=value2" or -d @data.txt
Json data: -d '{"key1":"value1", "key2":"value2"}’ or -d @data.json

Examples:

POST application/x-www-form-urlencoded:

$ curl -d "param1=value1&param2=value2" -X POST {url}

or with a data file:

$ curl -d "@data.txt" -X POST {url}

sample content of data.txt:

param1=value1&param2=value2

POST application/json:

$ curl -d '{"key1":"value1", "key2":"value2"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST {url}

or with a data file:

$ curl -d "@data.json" -X POST {url}

sample content of data.json file:

{
    "key1":"value1",  
    "key2":"value2"
}

HTTP Basic authentication

$ curl http://username:passwd@domain.com

or using -u option:

$ curl -u username:passwd {url}

Multipart file upload

Using -F or --form option:

$ curl -F upload=@localfilename -F press=OK [URL]

The corresponding HTML form could be written like this:

<form method="POST" enctype='multipart/form-data' action="upload.php">
  <input type=file name=upload>
  <input type=submit name=press value="OK">
</form>