Getting Started with cURL

To learn about curl , let’s know a little about the server first.

So, a server lets us / client access the data, resources giving us proper management, compute and ensures efficient working for apps and users.

Data - yes, that’s what curl exactly helps us do.

Let’s see what linux tells us about it—

curl is a tool for transferring data from or to a server using URLs. It supports these protocols: FILE, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, SMTP, WS and WSS etc.

Request using curl —

curl https://some-website.com

Curl fetches from the URL and prints the content in the terminal:

Save output in a file

curl example.com -o output.txt

Testing APIs —

Let’s try making a POST request using curl.

When testing APIs we need to send data, use different HTTP methods. curl flags can help us with that:

/ for moving to the next line

curl -X POST https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{ "title": "foo", "body": "bar", "userId": 1 }'

so, a post request will look something like this using curl and we’ll get the response inside our terminal.

Response —

{
  "title": "foo",
  "body": "bar",
  "userId": 1,
  "id": 101
}

The response returned here is only data oriented, if we use the -v flag, curl prints each and every step that happens while making the request.

common mistakes—

even an extra ” “ space can ruin the request, cli is sensitive
since we’re using cli, confusion can increase — no pretty print/write and
using \ to format data / multi line commands can be tough
missing flags or headers (like -H Content-Type) can lead to request rejection.

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