DEV Community

What is cURL and why is it all over API docs?

Amara Graham on February 19, 2019

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash I don’t know what your corner of the internet looks like, but mine looks something like this: “I just want to...
Collapse
 
tyronemapp profile image
Tyrone Mapp

Great article, helped me understand what on earth curl is.

I'm starting developing apps against the Atlassian API, have done some PHP, Python, Scripting, VBS, C# etc in the past, nothing too fancy but never done API dev work before. tbf Im still trying to work out how I access their API and what language I should be using in the browser to work with their API but small steps ... :)

Collapse
 
missamarakay profile image
Amara Graham

There are a number of free APIs with good data to play around with too, some have auth some don't. I feel like I mentioned it somewhere, but I'm not seeing it in this post. Here is a good list in case you want to play around with something that isn't the Atlassian API- github.com/public-apis/public-apis

Happy coding!

Collapse
 
biros profile image
Boris Jamot ✊ /

cURL is very powerful and as you said, available on quite any computer.
That being said, I found it a bit messy and inconsistent. Syntax varies between GET and POST, and the output is not (by default) the plain HTTP answer.
That's why I prefer using httpie which is an awesome user-friendly alternative to curl.
Please have a look at it and tell me what you think!

Thanks for your post!

Collapse
 
missamarakay profile image
Amara Graham

Definitely looks slick! I can see why you would prefer it over curl. Do you know of any API docs that use HTTPie in their examples?

Collapse
 
biros profile image
Boris Jamot ✊ /

No, sorry. But the httpie's doc is great !

Thread Thread
 
xoxopowo profile image
¡ xoxoPoWo !

It’s just a wrapper around curl.

Thread Thread
 
missamarakay profile image
Amara Graham

All roads lead to curl!

Collapse
 
jimmy19742 profile image
jimmy19742

I'm a beginner. I found this post via a SE but I have been using cURL and libcurl to check the raw headers ( of my competitors usually) , the fetch some content ( to output in a file) but not to update a content via REST API or to incorporate an API to an endpoint.
Always from Android OS.
Thank You for this article.

Collapse
 
didaarda profile image
Dida Arda

I found a GitHub project that converts curl commands into PHP curl code. Check this out

incarnate.github.io/curl-to-php/

Thank me later🌠

Collapse
 
akinkunmi006 profile image
Akinkunmi

I am using Linux, Ubuntu precisely but have never used curl, please include it to the article for newbies like us.

Thank you.

Collapse
 
dana94 profile image
Dana Ottaviani

I typically use Postman to test new APIs but I appreciate this explanation on what curl is since I hear about it a lot and have not used it before. 👍

Collapse
 
sahilrajput03 profile image
Sahil

i prefer curl over postman: github.com/sahilrajput03#stop-usin...