Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective
CURL
Free URL data transfer client software From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Remove ads
cURL (pronounced like "curl",[7] /kɜːrl/) is a free and open source CLI app for uploading and downloading individual files. It can download a URL from a web server over HTTP, and supports a variety of other network protocols, URI schemes, multiple versions of HTTP, and proxying. The project consists of a library (libcurl) and command-line tool (curl), which have been widely ported to different computing platforms.
It was created by Daniel Stenberg, who is still the lead developer of the project.
Remove ads
History
The software was first released in 1996,[8] originally named httpget
and then became urlget
, before adopting the current name of curl
.[9][10] The name stands for "Client for URL".[11] The original author and lead developer is the Swedish developer Daniel Stenberg, who created curl to power part of an IRC bot, because he wanted to automatically provide currency exchange rates, fetched from a website, to users in an IRC chat room.[2]
Remove ads
Components
Summarize
Perspective
libcurl
libcurl
is a client-side URL transfer library that powers curl
,[12] supporting DICT, FTP, FTPS, Gopher, HTTP/1[13] (with HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 support), HTTP cookies, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, HTTP proxy tunneling, HTTPS, IMAP, Kerberos, LDAP, MQTT, POP3, RTSP, RTMP, SCP, SMTP, and SMB. The library supports the file URI scheme, SFTP, Telnet, TFTP, file transfer resume, FTP uploading, HTTP form-based upload, HTTPS certificates, LDAPS, proxies, and user-plus-password authentication.[14]
The libcurl
library is portable, as it builds and works identically on most platforms, including:[15][16][17]
The libcurl
library is thread-safe and IPv6 compatible. Bindings are available for more than 50 languages, including C, C++, Java, Julia (is bundled with), PHP and Python.[19]
The libcurl
library supports GnuTLS, mbed TLS, NSS, GSKit on IBM i, SChannel on Windows, Secure Transport on macOS and iOS, SSL/TLS through OpenSSL, BoringSSL, libreSSL, AmiSSL, wolfSSL, BearSSL and rustls.[20]
curl
curl
is a command-line tool for getting or sending data, including files, using URL syntax. curl
provides an interface to the libcurl
library; it supports every protocol libcurl
supports.[14]
curl
supports HTTPS, and performs SSL or TLS certificate verification by default. When curl
connects to a remote server via HTTPS, it will obtain the remote server certificate, then checks against its CA certificate store the validity of the remote server to ensure the remote server is the one it claims to be. Some curl
packages are bundled with a CA certificate store file. There are several options to specify a CA certificate, such as --cacert
and --capath
. The --cacert
option can be used to specify the location of the CA certificate store file.
Starting with Windows 10 version 1809, Windows ships with curl.exe
.[17] On Microsoft Windows, if a CA certificate file is not specified, curl will look for the curl-ca-bundle.crt
file in the following locations, in the order given:[21]
- App's folder (where
curl.exe
is located) - Current working directory
C:\Windows\System32
directoryC:\Windows
directory- Directories specified in the
PATH
environment variable
curl
will return an error message if the remote server is using a self-signed certificate, or if the remote server certificate is not signed by a CA listed in the CA cert file. -k
or --insecure
option can be used to skip certificate verification. Alternatively, if the remote server is trusted, the remote server CA certificate can be added to the CA certificate store file.
Remove ads
See also
- curl-loader – an open-source testing tool based on curl
- libwww – an early library that comes with a command line interface
- PowerShell – the iwr (Invoke-WebRequest) Windows PowerShell had functionality similar to curl; class Web-client too.[22]
- Web crawler – an internet bot that can crawl the web
- Wget – similar command-line tool with no associated library but capable of recursive downloading
References
External links
Wikiwand - on
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Remove ads