curl Basics

~12 min · curl, http, headers, redirect

Level 0Pinger

0 XP0/101 lessons0/12 achievements

0/150 XP to next level150 XP to go0% complete

The Swiss Army knife of HTTP

curl talks HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SCP, SFTP, and dozens of other protocols. Day-to-day, you use it for HTTP — fetch, follow redirects, set headers, send JSON. Master a small set of flags and curl handles 90% of API debugging from the terminal.

The flags worth memorizing

Flag	Purpose
`-v`	Verbose — show request and response headers
`-I`	HEAD only — fetch headers, skip body
`-L`	Follow 3xx redirects
`-o file`	Write body to file
`-O`	Save with the URL's filename
`-s`	Silent (no progress bar)
`-S`	Show errors even with -s
`-w '%{http_code}'`	Print the status code (great for scripts)
`--max-time N`	Hard timeout in seconds

Code

Daily curl recipes·bash

# Just fetch a page
curl https://example.com

# Headers only
curl -I https://example.com

# Verbose — see everything
curl -v https://example.com

# Follow redirects, save to file with original name
curl -LO https://example.com/file.tar.gz

# Quiet health check that returns just the status code
curl -sS -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' https://example.com

# With a timeout
curl --max-time 5 -sS https://possibly-slow.example.com

External links

Exercise

Pick a URL you trust. Run curl -I https://... to see just the headers. Then curl -sS -o /dev/null -w 'http=%{http_code} time=%{time_total}s\n' https://... and note the metrics. This 4-flag pattern is your terminal-side uptime check.

Progress

Progress is local-only — sign in to sync across devices.

← Previoustraceroute & mtr Next →curl Advanced — APIs & Auth

Spotted a bug or have feedback on this page?Report an Issue

Comments 0

🔔 Reply notifications (sign in)

No comments yet — be the first.