What is cURL?
Curl is a command-line utility that allows users to create network requests. Curl is accessible on Windows, Linux, and Mac, making it the go-to choice for developers across all platforms.
A cURL is computer software and command-line tool used to make requests for different protocols. But the most popular usage with the curl command is making HTTP post requests. Even the curl command-line tool is created for the Linux operating systems it is cross-platform and can be used for Windows, MacOSX, BSD, etc. In this tutorial, we will learn how to make different HTTP POST requests by using curl.
Installing Curl on Ubuntu
If you get an error message saying curl command not found when trying to download a file with curl, it means that the curl the package is not installed on your Ubuntu machine.
curl is included in the default Ubuntu 22.04 repositories. The installation is pretty straightforward:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install curl
Once the installation is complete, verify it by typing curl in your terminal:
curl
Using curl
Once installed, you can test the curl command by sending requests to https://google.com using curl -I -L https://google.com command as shown below.
curl -I -L https://google.com
-I: Fetch the headers only. More on curl Main Page.
-L: If the server reports that the requested page has moved to a different location (indicated with a Location: header and a 3XX response code), this option will make curl redo the request in the new place.
Another common use case of curl is to download files from password-protected FTP servers:
curl -u FTP_USERNAME:FTP_PASSWORD ftp://example.com/file.tar.gz
Thank you for reading this article.
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