Everything curl

README

Everything curl is an extensive guide for all things curl. The project, the command-line tool, the library, how
everything started and how it came to be the useful tool it is today. It explains how we work on developing it
further, what it takes to use it, how you can contribute with code or bug reports and why millions of existing
users use it.

This book is meant to be interesting and useful to both casual readers and somewhat more experienced
developers. It offers something for everyone to pick and choose from.

Do not try to read it from front to back. Read the chapters or content you are curious about and flip back and
forth as you see fit.

I hope to run this book project as I do all other projects I work on: in the open, completely free to download
and read. I want it to be free for anyone to comment on, and available for everyone to contribute to and help
out with.

Send your bug reports, pull requests or critiques to me and I will improve this book accordingly.

This book will never be finished. I intend to keep working on it. While I may at some point consider it fairly
complete, covering most aspects of the project (even if only that seems like an insurmountable goal), the curl
project will continue to move so there will always be things to update in the book as well.

This book project started at the end of September 2015.

Site
https://everything.curl.dev is the home of this book. It features accessible links to read the book online in a
web version, or download a PDF version for offline reading. Unfortunately, the previously provided ebook
formats are no longer provided by gitbook.com that we use to produce the book.

(The "export PDF" option menu is only visible if the used web browser is wide enough.)

Content
All book content is hosted on GitHub in the https://github.com/bagder/everything-curl repository.

Author
With the hope of becoming just a co-author of this material, I am Daniel Stenberg. I founded the curl project
and I am a developer at heart—for fun and profit. I live and work in Stockholm, Sweden.

All there is to know about Daniel can be found on daniel.haxx.se.

Contribute
If you find mistakes, omissions, errors or blatant lies in this document, please send us a refreshed version of
the affected paragraph and we will amend and update. We give credits to and recognize everyone who
helps out!

Preferably, you could submit errors or pull requests on the book's GitHub page.

Contributors
Lots of people have reported bugs, improved sections or otherwise helped making this book the success it
is. These friends include the following:

AaronChen0 on github, alawvt on github, Amin Khoshnood, amnkh on github, Anders Roxell, Angad Gill,
Aris (Karim) Merchant, auktis on github, Ben Bodenmiller Ben Peachey, bookofportals on github, Bruno
Baguette, Carlton Gibson, Chris DeLuca, Citizen Esosa, Dan Fandrich, Daniel Brown, Daniel Sabsay,
David Piano, DrDoom74 at GitHub, Emil Hessman, enachos71 on github, ethomag on github, Fabian Keil,
faterer on github, Frank Dana, Frank Hassanabad, Gautham B A, Geir Hauge, Harry Wright, Helena Udd,
Hubert Lin, i-ky on github, infinnovation-dev on GitHub, Jay Ottinger, Jay Satiro, Jeroen Ooms, Johan
Wigert, John Simpson, JohnCoconut on github, Jonas Forsberg, Josh Vanderhook, JoyIfBam5, KJM on
github, knorr3 on github, lowttl on github, Luca Niccoli, Manuel on github, Marius Žilėnas, Mark Koester,
Martin van den Nieuwelaar, mehandes on github, Michael Kaufmann, Ms2ger, Nick Travers, Nicolas
Brassard, Oscar on github, Oskar Köök, Patrik Lundin, RekGRpth on github, Ryan McQuen, Saravanan
Musuwathi Kesavan, Senthil Kumaran, Shusen Liu, Sonia Hamilton, Spiros Georgaras, Stephen, Steve
Holme, Stian Hvatum, strupo on github, Viktor Szakats, Vitaliy T, Wayne Lai, Wieland Hoffmann, 谭九鼎

License
This document is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

How to read this book

Here is an overview of the main sections of this book and what they cover.
1. The cURL project
Project things. How it started, how we work and how often releases are made.

2. Network and protocols

What exactly are networks and protocols?

3. Install curl
How and where to get and install curl.

4. Source code
A description of the curl source tree and how the layout of the code is and works.

5. Build curl
How to build curl and libcurl from source.

6. Command line basics

Start at the beginning. How do you use curl from a command line?

7. Using curl
Going deeper, looking at things you do with curl the command line tool.

8. HTTP with curl

Digging deeper on HTTP specific actions to do with the curl command line tool.
9. FTP with curl
Learn FTP specific operations in this chapter.

10. Using libcurl

How libcurl works and how you use it when writing your own applications with it.

11. HTTP with libcurl

A closer look at doing HTTP specific things with libcurl.

12. Bindings for libcurl

A casual overview of some of the most popular libcurl bindings and how similar they are to the libcurl C API.

13. libcurl internals

Under the hood it works like this…

14. Index
The index.

The cURL project

 curl logo

A funny detail about Open Source projects is that they are called "projects", as if they were somehow limited
in time or ever can get done. The cURL "project" is a number of loosely coupled individual volunteers
working on writing software together with a common mission: to do reliable data transfers with Internet
protocols, as Open Source.

How it started

Back in 1996, Daniel Stenberg was writing an IRC bot in his spare time, an automated program that would
offer services for the participants in a chatroom dedicated to the Amiga computer (#amiga on the IRC
network EFnet). He came to think that it would be fun to get some updated currency rates and have his bot
offer a service online for the chat room users to get current exchange rates, to ask the bot "please exchange
200 USD into SEK" or similar.

In order to have the provided exchange rates as accurate as possible, the bot would download the rates
daily from a website that was hosting them. A small tool to download data over HTTP was needed for this
task. A quick look-around at the time had Daniel find a tiny tool named httpget (written by the Brazilian
developer Rafael Sagula). It did the job, almost, just needed a few little tweaks here and there.

Rafael released HttpGet 0.1 on November 11, 1996 and already in the next release, called 0.2 released in
December that year, Daniel had his first changes included. Soon after that, Daniel had taken over
maintenance of the few hundred lines of code it was.

HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support.

We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER. Once FTP download support was
added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0 was released in August 1997. The HTTP-only
days were already passed.

The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the name once again was
misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20, 1998 curl 4 was released. (The version
numbering from the previous names was kept.)

We consider March 20 1998 to be curl's birthday.

The name

Naming things is hard.

The tool was about uploading and downloading data specified with a URL. It was a client-side program (the
'c'), a URL client, and would show the data (by default). So 'c' for Client and URL: cURL.
Nothing more was needed so the name was selected and we never looked back again.

Later on, someone suggested that curl could actually be a clever "recursive acronym" (where the first letter
in the acronym refers back to the same word): "Curl URL Request Library".

While that is awesome, it was actually not the original thought. We wish we were that clever…

There are and were other projects using the name curl in various ways, but we were not aware of them by
the time our curl came to be.

Pronunciation
Most of us pronounce "curl" with an initial k sound, just like the English word curl. It rhymes with words like
girl and earl. Merriam Webster has a short WAV file to help.

Confusions and mix-ups

Soon after our curl was created another "curl" appeared that created a programming language. That curl still
exists.

Several libcurl bindings for various programming languages use the term "curl" or "CURL" in part or
completely to describe their bindings. Sometimes you will find users talking about curl but referring to neither
the command-line tool nor the library that is made by this project.

As a verb
'To curl something' is sometimes used as a reference to use a non-browser tool to download a file or
resource from a URL.

What does curl do?

cURL is a project and its primary purpose and focus is to make two products:

curl, the command-line tool

libcurl the transfer library with a C API

Both the tool and the library do Internet transfers for resources specified as URLs using Internet protocols.

Everything and anything that is related to Internet protocol transfers can be considered curl's business.
Things that are not related to that should be avoided and be left for other projects and products.

It could be important to also consider that curl and libcurl try to avoid handling the actual data that is
transferred. It has, for example, no knowledge about HTML or anything else of the content that is popular to
transfer over HTTP, but it knows all about how to transfer such data over HTTP.

Both products are frequently used not only to drive thousands or millions of scripts and applications for an
Internet connected world, but they are also widely used for server testing, protocol fiddling and trying out
new things.

The library is used in every imaginable sort of embedded device where Internet transfers are needed: car
infotainment, televisions, Blu-Ray players, set-top boxes, printers, routers, game systems, etc.

Command line tool

Running curl from the command line was natural and Daniel never considered anything else than that it
would output data on stdout, to the terminal, by default. The "everything is a pipe" mantra of standard Unix
philosophy was something Daniel believed in. curl is like 'cat' or one of the other Unix tools; it sends data to
stdout to make it easy to chain together with other tools to do what you want. That is also why virtually all
curl options that allow reading from a file or writing to a file, also have the ability to select doing it to stdout or
from stdin.

Following the Unix style of how command-line tools work, there was also never any question about whether
curl should support multiple URLs on the command line.

The command-line tool is designed to work perfectly from scripts or other automatic means. It does not
feature any other GUI or UI other than mere text in and text out.

The library
While the command-line tool came first, the network engine was ripped out and converted into a library
during the year 2000 and the concepts we still have today were introduced with libcurl 7.1 in August 2000.
Since then, the command line tool has been a thin layer of logic to make a tool around the library that does
all the heavy lifting.

libcurl is designed and meant to be available for anyone who wants to add client-side file transfer
capabilities to their software, on any platform, any architecture and for any purpose. libcurl is also extremely
liberally licensed to avoid that becoming an obstacle.

libcurl is written in traditional and conservative C. Where other languages are preferred, people have
created libcurl bindings for them.

Project communication

cURL is an Open Source project consisting of voluntary members from all over the world, living and working
in a large number of the world's time zones. To make such a setup actually work, communication and
openness is key. We keep all communication public and we use open communication channels. Most
discussions are held on mailing lists, we use bug trackers where all issues are discussed and handled with
full insight for everyone who cares to look.
It is important to realize that we are all jointly taking care of the project, we fix problems and we add features.
Sometimes a regular contributor grows bored and fades away, sometimes a new eager contributor steps out
from the shadows and starts helping out more. To keep this ship going forward as well as possible, it is
important that we maintain open discussions and that is one of the reasons why we frown upon users who
take discussions privately or try to email individual team members about development issues, questions,
debugging or whatever.

In this day, mailing lists may be considered the old style of communication — no fancy web forums or similar.
Using a mailing list is therefore becoming an art that is not practiced everywhere and may be a bit strange
and unusual to you. But fear not. It is just about sending emails to an address that then sends that email out
to all the subscribers. Our mailing lists have at most a few thousand subscribers. If you are mailing for the
first time, it might be good to read a few old mails first to get to learn the culture and what's considered good
practice.

The mailing lists and the bug tracker have changed hosting providers a few times and there are reasons to
suspect it might happen again in the future. It is just the kind of thing that happens to a project that lives for a
long time.

A few users also hang out on IRC in the #curl channel on libera.chat.

Mailing list etiquette

Like many communities and subcultures, we have developed guidelines and rules of what we think is the
right way to behave and how to communicate on the mailing lists. The curl mailing list etiquette follows the
style of traditional Open Source projects.

Do not mail a single individual

Many people send one question directly to one person. One person gets many mails, and there is only one
person who can give you a reply. The question may be something that other people also want to ask. These
other people have no way to read the reply but to ask the one person the question. The one person
consequently gets overloaded with mail.

If you really want to contact an individual and perhaps pay for his or her services, by all means go ahead,
but if it's just another curl question, take it to a suitable list instead.

Reply or new mail

Please do not reply to an existing message as a shortcut to post a message to the lists.

Many mail programs and web archivers use information within mails to keep them together as "threads", as
collections of posts that discuss a certain subject. If you do not intend to reply on the same or similar subject,
do not just hit reply on an existing mail and change subject; create a new mail.

Reply to the list

When replying to a message from the list, make sure that you do "group reply" or "reply to all", and not just
reply to the author of the single mail you reply to.

We are actively discouraging replying back to just a single person privately. Keep follow-ups on discussions
on the list.

Use a sensible subject

Please use a subject of the mail that makes sense and that is related to the contents of your mail. It makes it
a lot easier to find your mail afterwards and it makes it easier to track mail threads and topics.

Do not top-post
If you reply to a message, do not use top-posting. Top-posting is when you write the new text at the top of a
mail and you insert the previous quoted mail conversation below. It forces users to read the mail in a
backwards order to properly understand it.

This is why top posting is so bad:

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.

Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in email?

Apart from the screwed-up read order (especially when mixed together in a thread when someone responds
using the mandated bottom-posting style), it also makes it impossible to quote only parts of the original mail.

When you reply to a mail you let the mail client insert the previous mail quoted. Then you put the cursor on
the first line of the mail and you move down through the mail, deleting all parts of the quotes that do not add
context for your comments. When you want to add a comment you do so, inline, right after the quotes that
relate to your comment. Then you continue downwards again.

When most of the quotes have been removed and you have added your own words, you are done.

HTML is not for mails

Please switch off those HTML encoded messages. You can mail all those funny mails to your friends. We
speak plain text mails.

Quoting
Quote as little as possible. Just enough to provide the context you cannot leave out. A lengthy description
can be found here.

Digest
We allow subscribers to subscribe to the "digest" version of the mailing lists. A digest is a collection of mails
lumped together in one single mail.

Should you decide to reply to a mail sent out as a digest, there are two things you MUST consider if you
really really cannot subscribe normally instead:

Cut off all mails and chatter that is not related to the mail you want to reply to.

Change the subject name to something sensible and related to the subject, preferably even the actual
subject of the single mail you wanted to reply to.

Please tell us how you solved the problem

Many people mail questions to the list, people spend some of their time and make an effort in providing good
answers to these questions.

If you are the one who asks, please consider responding once more in case one of the hints was what
solved your problems. Those who write answers feel good to know that they provided a good answer and
that you fixed the problem. Far too often, the person who asked the question is never heard of again, and we
never get to know if he/she is gone because the problem was solved or perhaps because the problem was
unsolvable!

Getting the solution posted also helps other users that experience the same problem(s). They get to see
(possibly in the web archives) that the suggested fixes actually has helped at least one person.

Mailing lists

Some of the most important mailing lists are…

curl-users
The main mailing list for users and developers of the curl command-line tool, for questions and help around
curl concepts, command-line options, the protocols curl can speak or even related tools. We tend to move
development issues or more advanced bug fixes discussions over to curl-library instead, since libcurl is the
engine that drives most of curl.

See curl-users

curl-library
The main development list, and also for users of libcurl. We discuss how to use libcurl in applications as
well as development of libcurl itself. You will find lots of questions on libcurl behavior, debugging and
documentation issues.

See curl-library

curl-announce
This mailing list only gets announcements about new releases and security problems—nothing else. This
one is for those who want a more casual feed of information from the project.

See curl-announce

Reporting bugs

The development team does a lot of testing. We have a whole test suite that is run frequently every day on
numerous platforms in order to exercise all code and make sure everything works as supposed.

Still, there are times when things are not working the way they should. Then we appreciate getting those
problems reported.

A bug is a problem
Any problem can be considered a bug. A weirdly phrased wording in the manual that prevents you from
understanding something is a bug. A surprising side effect of combining multiple options can be a bug—or
perhaps it should be better documented? Perhaps the option does not do at all what you expected it to?
That is a problem and we should fix it.
Problems must be known to get fixed
This may sound easy and uncomplicated but is a fundamental truth in our and other projects. Just because it
is an old project and have thousands of users does not mean that the development team knows about the
problem you just fell over. Maybe users have not paid enough attention to details like you, or perhaps it just
never triggered for anyone else.

We rely on users experiencing problems to report them. We need to learn the problems exist so that we can
fix them.

Fixing the problems

Software engineering is, to a large degree, about fixing problems. To fix a problem a developer needs to
understand how to repeat it and to do that the debugging person needs to be told what set of circumstances
that made the problem trigger.

A good bug report

A good report explains what happened and what you thought was going to happen. Tell us exactly what
versions of the different components you used and take us step by step through what you do to get the
problem.

After you submit a bug report, you can expect there to be follow-up questions or perhaps requests that you
try out various things and tasks in order for the developer to be able to narrow down the suspects and make
sure your problem is being cornered in properly.

A bug report that is submitted but is abandoned by the submitter risks getting closed if the developer fails to
understand it, fails to reproduce it or faces other problems when working on it. Do not abandon your report!

Report curl bugs in the curl bug tracker on GitHub!

Testing
Testing software thoroughly and properly is a lot of work. Testing software that runs on dozens of operating
systems and dozens of CPU architectures, with server implementations with their owns sets of bugs and
interpretations of the specs, is even more work.

The curl project has a test suite that iterates over all existing test cases, runs the test and verifies that the
outcome is the correct one and that no other problem happened, like a memory leak or something fishy in
the protocol layer.

The test suite is meant to be possible to run after you have built curl yourself and there are a fair number of
volunteers who also help out by running the test suite automatically a few times per day to make sure the
latest commits get a run. This way, we discover the worst flaws pretty soon after they were introduced.
We do not test everything and even when we try to test things there will always be subtle details that get
through and that we, sometimes years after the fact, figure out were wrong.

Due to the nature of different systems and funny use cases on the Internet, eventually some of the best
testing is done by users when they run the code to perform their own use cases.

Another limiting factor with the test suite is that the test setup itself is less portable than curl and libcurl so
there are in fact platforms where curl runs fine but the test suite cannot execute at all.

Commercial support

Commercial support for curl and libcurl is offered and provided by Daniel Stenberg (the curl founder) through
the company wolfSSL.

wolfSSL offers world-wide commercial support on curl done by the masters of curl. wolfSSL handles curl
customization, ports to new operating systems, feature development, patch maintenance, bug fixing,
upstreaming, training, code reviews of libcurl API use, security scanning your curl use and more - with
several different support options from basic up to full 24/7 support. With guaranteed response times.

See the support page for contact details.

Releases

A release in the curl project means packaging up all the source code that is in the master branch of the code
repository, signing the package, tagging the point in the code repository, and then putting it up on the
website for the world to download.

It is one single source code archive for all platforms curl can run on. It is the one and only package for both
curl and libcurl.

We never ship any curl or libcurl binaries from the project with one exception: we host official curl binaries
built for Windows users. All the other packaged binaries that are provided with operating systems or on other
download sites are done by gracious volunteers outside of the project.

As of several years back, we make an effort to do our releases on an eight week cycle and unless some
really serious and urgent problem shows up we stick to this schedule. We release on a Wednesday, and
then again a Wednesday eight weeks later and so it continues. Non-stop.

For every release we tag the source code in the repository with "curl-release version" and we update the
changelog.

We had done 210 curl releases by August 2022. The entire release history and changelog is available in
our curl release log.

Release cycle
 The curl release cycle visualized

Daily snapshots
Every single change to the source code is committed and pushed to the source code repository. This
repository is hosted on github.com and is using git these days (but has not always been this way). When
building curl off the repository, there are a few things you need to generate and setup that sometimes cause
people some problems or just friction. To help with that, we provide daily snapshots.

The daily snapshots are generated daily (clever naming, right?) as if a release had been made at that point.
It produces a package of all sources code and all files that are normally part of a release and puts it in a
package and uploads it to this special place to allow interested people to get the latest code to test, to
experiment or whatever.

The snapshots are kept for around 20 days until deleted.

Security

Security is a primary concern for us in the curl project. We take it seriously and we work hard on providing
secure and safe implementations of all protocols and related code. As soon as we get knowledge about a
security related problem or just a suspected problem, we deal with it and we will attempt to provide a fix and
security notice no later than in the next pending release.

We use a responsible disclosure policy, meaning that we prefer to discuss and work on security fixes out of
the public eye and we alert the vendors on the openwall.org list a few days before we announce the problem
and fix to the world. This, in an attempt to shorten the time span the bad guys can take advantage of a
bl til fi d i h b d l d

Past security problems

During the years we have had our fair share of security related problems. We work hard on documenting
every problem thoroughly with all details listed and clearly stated to aid users. Users of curl should be able
to figure out what problems their particular curl versions and use cases are vulnerable to.

To help with this, we present this waterfall chart showing how all vulnerabilities affect which curl versions
and we have this complete list of all known security problems since the birth of this project.

Trust

For a software to conquer the world, it needs to be trusted. It takes trust to build more trust and it can all be
broken down really fast if the foundation is proven to have cracks.

In the curl project we build trust for our users in a few different ways:

1. We are completely transparent about everything. Every decision, every discussion as well as every line
of code and every considered code change are always public and done in the open.
2. We work hard to write reliable code. We write test cases, we review code, we document best practices
and we have a style guide that helps us keep code consistent.
3. We stick to promises and guarantees as much as possible. We do not break APIs and we do not
abandon support for old systems.
4. Security is of utmost importance and we take every reported incident seriously and realize that we must
fix all known problems and we need to do it responsibly. We do our best to not endanger our users.

5. We act like adults. We can be silly and we can joke around, but we do it responsibly and we follow our
Code of Conduct. Everyone should be able to even trust us to behave.

Code of Conduct

As contributors and maintainers of this project, we pledge to respect all people who contribute through
reporting issues, posting feature requests, updating documentation, submitting pull requests or patches, and
other activities.

We are committed to making participation in this project a harassment-free experience for everyone,
regardless of level of experience, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability,
personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, or religion.

Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include the use of sexual language or imagery,
derogatory comments or personal attacks, trolling, public or private harassment, insults, or other
unprofessional conduct.
Project maintainers have the right and responsibility to remove, edit, or reject comments, commits, code, wiki
edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct. Project maintainers who
do not follow the Code of Conduct may be removed from the project team.

This code of conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is
representing the project or its community.

Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported by opening an issue
or contacting one or more of the project maintainers.

Development

We encourage everyone to participate in the development of curl and libcurl. We appreciate all the help we
can get and while the main portion of this project is source code, there is a lot more than just coding and
debugging help that is needed and useful.

We develop and discuss everything in the open, preferably on the mailing lists.

Source code on GitHub

The source code to curl and libcurl have also been provided and published publicly and it continues to be
uploaded to the main web site for every release.

Since March 2010, the curl source code repository has been hosted on github.com. By being up to date with
the changes there, you can follow our day to day development closely.

The development team

Daniel Stenberg is the founder and self-proclaimed leader of the project. Everybody else that participates or
contributes in the project has thus arrived at a later point. Some contributors worked for a while and then left
again. Most contributors hang around only for a short while to get their bug fixed or feature merged or similar.
Counting all contributors we know the names of, we have received help from more than 2,500 individuals.

The full list of people who ever did ten commits or more within a single year in the project are:

Alessandro Ghedini, Ben Greear, Benoit Neil, Bill Hoffman, Bill Nagel, Björn Stenberg, Brad Hards, Dan
Fandrich, Daniel Gustafsson, Daniel Stenberg, Dominick Meglio, Emil Engler, Fabian Frank, Fabian Keil,
Gergely Nagy, Gisle Vanem, Guenter Knauf, Harry Sintonen, Isaac Boukris, Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, Jakub
Zakrzewski, James Housley, Jay Satiro, Jiri Hruska, Joe Mason, Johannes Schindelin, Josh Soref, Julien
Chaffraix, Kamil Dudka, Marc Hoersken, Marcel Raad, Mark Salisbury, Marty Kuhrt, Max Dymond, Michael
Kaufmann, Michael Osipov, Michal Marek, Nick Zitzmann, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos, Patrick Monnerat,
Peter Wu, Rikard Falkeborn, Ruslan Baratov, Simon Warta, Steinar H. Gunderson, Sterling Hughes, Steve
Holme, Svyatoslav Mishyn, Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa, Tor Arntsen, Viktor Szakats, Yang Tse
Users of curl

ten billion installations

We use to say that there are around ten billion curl installations. It makes a good line to say but in reality we,
of course, do not have any numbers that exact. We just estimate and guess based on observations and
trends. It also depends on exactly what we consider "an installation". Let's elaborate.

Open Source
The project being Open Source and liberally licensed means that just about anyone can redistribute curl in
source format or built into binary form.

Counting downloads
The curl command-line tool and the libcurl library are available for download for most operating systems via
the curl website, they are provided via third party installers to a bunch and they come installed by default
with even more operating systems. This makes counting downloads from the curl website completely
inappropriate as a means of measurement.

Finding users
So, we cannot count downloads and anyone may redistribute it and nobody is forced to tell us they use curl.
How can we figure out the numbers? How can we figure out the users? The answer is that we really cannot
with any decent level of accuracy.

Instead we rely on witness reports, circumstantial evidence, on findings on the Internet, the occasional
"about box" or license agreement mentioning curl or that authors ask for help and tell us about their use.

The curl license says users need to repeat it somewhere, like in the documentation, but that is not easy for
us to find in many cases and it's also not easy for us to do anything about should they decide not to follow
the small license requirement.

Command-line tool users

The command-line tool curl is widely used by programmers around the world in shell and batch scripts, to
debug servers and to test out things. There is no doubt it is used by millions every day.

Embedded library
libcurl is what makes our project reach the really large volume of users. The ability to quickly and easily get
client side file transfer abilities into your application is desirable for a lot of users, and then libcurl's great
portability also helps: you can write more or less the same application on a wide variety of platforms and you
can still keep using libcurl for transfers.

libcurl being written in C with no or just a few required dependencies also help to get it used in embedded
systems.

libcurl is popularly used in smartphone operating systems, in car infotainment setups, in television sets, in
set-top boxes, in audio and video equipment such as Blu-Ray players and higher-end receivers. It is often
used in home routers and printers.

A fair number of best-selling games are also using libcurl, on Windows and game consoles.
 different devices, tool, applications and services that all run curl

In website backends
The libcurl binding for PHP was one of, if not the, first bindings for libcurl to really catch on and get used
widely. It quickly got adopted as a default way for PHP users to transfer data and as it has now been in that
position for over a decade and PHP has turned out to be a fairly popular technology on the Internet (recent
numbers indicated that something like a quarter of all sites on the Internet uses PHP).

A few really high-demand sites are using PHP and are using libcurl in the backend. Facebook and Yahoo
are two such sites.

Famous users
Nothing forces users to tell us they use curl or libcurl in their services or in the products. We usually only find
out they do by accident, by reading about dialogues, documentation and license agreements. Of course
some companies also just flat out tell us.

We used to collect names of companies and products on our website of users that use the project's products
"in commercial environments". We did this mostly just to show-off to other big brands that if these other guys
can build products that depend on us, maybe you can, too?

The list of companies contains hundreds of names, but extracting some of the larger or more well-known
brands, here's a pretty good list that, of course, is only a small selection:

Adobe, Altera, AOL, Apple, AT&T, BBC, Blackberry, BMW, Bosch, Broadcom, Chevrolet, Cisco, Comcast,
Facebook, Google, Hitachi, Honeywell, HP, Huawei, HTC, IBM, Intel, LG, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft,
Motorola, NASA, Netflix, Nintendo, Oracle, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, RBS, Samsung, SanDisk, SAP,
SAS Institute, SEB, Sharp, Siemens, Sony, Spotify, Sun, Swisscom, Tomtom, Toshiba, VMware, Xilinx,
Yahoo, Yamaha

Famous high volume apps using curl

The Google Youtube app, the Google Photos app, Spotify, Instagram, Skype (on Android), bundled with iOS,
Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite.
Future

curl future

There is no slowdown in sight in curl's future, bugs reported, development pace or how Internet protocols
are being developed or updated.

We are looking forward to support for more protocols, support for more features within the already supported
protocols, and more and better APIs for libcurl to allow users to do transfers even better and faster.

The project casually maintains a TODO file holding a bunch of ideas that we could work on in the future. It
also keeps a KNOWN_BUGS document with a list of known problems we would like to fix.

There is a ROADMAP document that describes some plans for the short-term that some of the active
developers

thought they would work on next. Of course, we can not promise that we will always follow it perfectly.

We are highly dependent on developers to join in and work on what they want to get done, be it bug fixes or
new features.

Network and protocols

Before diving in and talking about how to use curl to get things done, let's take a look at what all this
networking is and how it works using simplifications and some minor shortcuts to give an easy overview
The basics are in the networking simplified chapter that tries to just draw a simple picture of what networking
is from a curl perspective, and the protocols section which explains what exactly a "protocol" is and how that
works.

Networking simplified

Networking means communicating between two endpoints on the Internet. The Internet is just a bunch of
interconnected machines (computers really), each using its own individual addresses (called IP addresses).
The addresses each machine has can be of different types and machines can even have temporary
addresses. These computers are also called hosts.

Client and server

The computer, tablet or phone you sit in front of is usually called "the client" and the machine out there
somewhere that you want to exchange data with is called "the server". The main difference between the
client and the server is in the roles they play here. There is nothing that prevents the roles from being
reversed in a subsequent operation.

A transfer initiative is always taken by the client, as the server cannot contact the client but the client can
contact the server.

Which machine
When we as a client want to initiate a transfer from or to one of the machines out there (a server), we usually
do not know its IP addresses but instead we usually know its name. The name of the machine to
communicate with is typically embedded in the URL that we work with when we use tools like curl or a
browser.

We might use a URL like http://example.com/index.html , which means the client will connect to
and communicate with the host named example.com.

Host name resolving

Once the client knows the host name, it needs to figure out which IP addresses the host with that name has
so that it can contact it.

Converting the name to an IP address is called 'name resolving'. The name is "resolved" to one or a set of
addresses. This is usually done by a "DNS server", DNS being like a big lookup table that can convert
names to addresses—all the names on the Internet, really. The computer normally already knows the
address of a computer that runs the DNS server as that is part of setting up the network.
The network client will therefore ask the DNS server: "Hello, please give me all the addresses for
example.com", and the server responds with a list of them. Or in case of spelling errors, it can answer back
that the name does not exist.

Establish a connection
With one or more IP addresses for the host the client wants to contact, it sends a "connect request". The
connection it wants to establish is called a TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) or QUIC connection and
they work similar to connecting an invisible string between two computers. Once established, the string can
be used to send a stream of data in both directions.

If the client has received more than one address for the host, it will traverse that list of addresses when
connecting and in case one of fails it will try to connect to the next one until either one connect works or they
all fail.

Connects to port numbers

When connecting with TCP or QUIC to a remote server, a client selects which port number to do that on. A
port number is just a dedicated place for a particular service, which allows that same server to listen to other
services on other port numbers at the same time.

Most common protocols have default port numbers that clients and servers use. For example, when using
the http://example.com/index.html URL, that URL specifies a scheme called HTTP which tells
the client that it should try TCP port number 80 on the server by default. If the URL uses HTTPS instead, the
default port number is 443.

The URL can optionally provide another, custom, port number but if nothing special is specified, it will use
the default port for the scheme used in the URL.

Security
After a TCP connection has been established, many transfers will require that both sides negotiate a better
security level before continuing (if for example HTTPS is used), done with TLS; Transport Layer Security. If
that is used, the client and server will do a TLS handshake first and only continue further if that succeeds.

If the connection is done using QUIC, the TLS handshake is done automatically in the connect phase.

Transfer data
When the connected metaphorical "string" is attached to the remote computer, there is an established
connection between the two machines and this connection can then be used to exchange data. That
communication is done using a "protocol", as discussed in the following chapter.

Traditionally, what is called a download is when data is transferred from a server to a client and inversely an
upload is when data is transferred from the client to the server. The client is down here. The server is up
there.

Disconnect
When a single transfer is done, the connection may have served its purpose. It can then either be reused for
further transfers, or it can be disconnected and closed down.

Protocols

The language used to ask for data to get sent—in either direction—is called the protocol. The protocol
describes exactly how to ask the server for data, or to tell the server that there is data coming.

Protocols are typically defined by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), which hosts RFC documents
that describe exactly how each protocol works: how clients and servers are supposed to act and what to
send and so on.

What protocols does curl support?

curl supports protocols that allow "data transfers" in either or both directions. We usually also restrict
ourselves to protocols which have a "URI format" described in an RFC or at least is somewhat widely used,
as curl works primarily with URLs (URIs really) as the input key that specifies the transfer.

The latest curl (as of this writing) supports these protocols:

DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT,
POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET, TFTP

To complicate matters further, the protocols often exist in different versions or flavors as well.

What other protocols are there?

The world is full of protocols, both old and new. Old protocols get abandoned and dropped and new ones
get introduced. There is never a state of stability but the situation changes from day to day and year to year.
You can rest assured that there will be new protocols added in the list above in the future and that there will
be new versions of the protocols already listed.
There are, of course, already other protocols in existence that curl does not yet support. We are open to
supporting more protocols that suit the general curl paradigms, we just need developers to write the
necessary code adjustments for them.

How are protocols developed?

Both new versions of existing protocols and entirely new protocols are usually developed by persons or
teams that feel that the existing ones are not good enough. Something about them makes them not suitable
for a particular use case or perhaps some new idea has popped up that could be applied to improve things.

Of course, nothing prevents anyone from developing a protocol entirely on their own at their own pleasure in
their own backyard, but the major protocols are usually brought to the IETF at a fairly early stage where they
are then discussed, refined, debated and polished and then eventually, ideally, turned into a published RFC
document.

Software developers then read the RFC specifications and deploy their code in the world based on their
interpretations of the words in those documents. It sometimes turn out that some of the specifications are
subject to vastly different interpretations or sometimes the engineers are just lazy and ignore sound advice
in the specs and deploy something that does not adhere. Writing software that interoperates with other
implementations of the specifications can therefore end up being hard work.

How much do protocols change?

Like software, protocol specifications are frequently updated and new protocol versions are created.

Most protocols allow some level of extensibility which makes new extensions show up over time, extensions
that make sense to support.

The interpretation of a protocol sometimes changes even if the spec remains the same.

The protocols mentioned in this chapter are all "Application Protocols", which means they are transferred
over more lower level protocols, like TCP, UDP and TLS. They are also themselves protocols that change
over time, get new features and get attacked so that new ways of handling security, etc., forces curl to adapt
and change.

About adhering to standards and who's right

Generally, there are protocol specs that tell us how to send and receive data for specific protocols. The
protocol specs we follow are RFCs put together and published by IETF.

Some protocols are not properly documented in a final RFC, like, for example, SFTP for which our
implementation is based on an Internet-draft that is not even the last available one.
Protocols are, however, spoken by two parties and like in any given conversation, there are then two sides
of understanding something or interpreting the given instructions in a spec. Also, lots of network software is
written without the authors paying close attention to the spec so they end up taking some shortcuts, or
perhaps they just interpreted the text differently. Sometimes even mistakes and bugs make software behave
in ways that are not mandated by the spec and sometimes even downright forbidden in the specs.

In the curl project we use the published specs as rules on how to act until we learn anything else. If popular
alternative implementations act differently than what we think the spec says and that alternative behavior is
what works widely on the big Internet, then chances are we will change foot and instead decide to act like
those others. If a server refuses to talk with us when we think we follow the spec but works fine when we
bend the rules every so slightly, then we probably end up bending them exactly that way—if we can still
work successfully with other implementations.

Ultimately, it is a personal decision and up for discussion in every case where we think a spec and the real
world do not align.

In the worst cases we introduce options to let application developers and curl users have the final say on
what curl should do. I say worst because it is often really tough to ask users to make these decisions as it
usually involves tricky details and weirdness going on and it is a lot to ask of users. We should always do
our best to avoid pushing such protocol decisions to users.

curl protocols

curl supports about 26 protocols. We say "about" because it depends on how you count and what you
consider to be distinctly different protocols.

DICT
DICT is a dictionary network protocol, it allows clients to ask dictionary servers about a meaning or
explanation for words. See RFC 2229. Dict servers and clients use TCP port 2628.

FILE

FILE is not actually a "network" protocol. It is a URL scheme that allows you to tell curl to get a file from the
local file system instead of getting it over the network from a remote server. See RFC 1738.

FTP
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is an old (originates in the early 1970s) way to transfer files back
and forth between a client and a server. See RFC 959. It has been extended greatly over the years. FTP
servers and clients use TCP port 21 plus one more port, though the second one is usually dynamically
established during communication.

See the external page FTP vs HTTP for how it differs to HTTP.

FTPS
FTPS stands for Secure File Transfer Protocol. It follows the tradition of appending an 'S' to the protocol
name to signify that the protocol is done like normal FTP but with an added SSL/TLS security layer. See
RFC 4217.

This protocol is problematic to use through firewalls and other network equipment.

GOPHER
Designed for "distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the Internet", Gopher is somewhat of
the grand father to HTTP as HTTP has mostly taken over completely for the same use cases. See RFC
1436. Gopher servers and clients use TCP port 70.

GOPHERS
Gopher over TLS. A recent extension to the old protocol.

HTTP
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP, is the most widely used protocol for transferring data on the web and
over the Internet. See RFC 7230 for HTTP/1.1 and RFC 7540 for HTTP/2. HTTP servers and clients use
TCP port 80.

HTTPS
Secure HTTP is HTTP done over an SSL/TLS connection. See RFC 2818. HTTPS servers and clients use
TCP port 443, unless they speak HTTP/3 which then uses QUIC and is done over UDP.

IMAP
The Internet Message Access Protocol, IMAP, is a protocol for accessing, controlling and "reading" email.
See RFC 3501. IMAP servers and clients use TCP port 143. Whilst connections to the server start out as
cleartext, SSL/TLS communication may be supported by the client explicitly requesting to upgrade the
connection using the STARTTLS command. See RFC 2595.

IMAPS
Secure IMAP is IMAP done over an SSL/TLS connection. Such connections implicitly start out using
SSL/TLS and as such servers and clients use TCP port 993 to communicate with each other. See RFC
8314.

LDAP
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, LDAP, is a protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed
directory information. Basically a database lookup. See RFC 4511. LDAP servers and clients use TCP port
389.

LDAPS
Secure LDAP is LDAP done over an SSL/TLS connection.

MQTT
Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, MQTT, is a protocol commonly used in IoT systems for
interchanging data mostly involving smaller devices. It is a so called "publish-subscribe" protocol.

POP3

The Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) is a protocol for retrieving email from a server. See RFC 1939.
POP3 servers and clients use TCP port 110. Whilst connections to the server start out as cleartext, SSL/TLS
communication may be supported by the client explicitly requesting to upgrade the connection using the
STLS command. See RFC 2595.

POP3S
Secure POP3 is POP3 done over an SSL/TLS connection. Such connections implicitly start out using
SSL/TLS and as such servers and clients use TCP port 995 to communicate with each other. See RFC
8314.

RTMP
The Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) is a protocol for streaming audio, video and data. RTMP
servers and clients use TCP port 1935.

RTSP
The Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is a network control protocol to control streaming media servers.
See RFC 2326. RTSP servers and clients use TCP and UDP port 554.

SCP
The Secure Copy (SCP) protocol is designed to copy files to and from a remote SSH server. SCP servers
and clients use TCP port 22.

SFTP
The SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) that provides file access, file transfer, and file management over a
reliable data stream. SFTP servers and clients use TCP port 22.

SMB
The Server Message Block (SMB) protocol is also known as CIFS. It is an application-layer network protocol
mainly used for providing shared access to files, printers, and serial ports and miscellaneous
communications between nodes on a network. SMB servers and clients use TCP port 445.

SMBS
SMB done over TLS.
SMTP
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is a protocol for email transmission. See RFC 5321. SMTP
servers and clients use TCP port 25. Whilst connections to the server start out as cleartext, SSL/TLS
communication may be supported by the client explicitly requesting to upgrade the connection using the
STARTTLS command. See RFC 3207.

SMTPS
Secure SMTP, is SMTP done over an SSL/TLS connection. Such connections implicitly start out using
SSL/TLS and as such servers and clients use TCP port 465 to communicate with each other. See RFC
8314.

TELNET
TELNET is an application layer protocol used over networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-
oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. See RFC 854. TELNET servers and
clients use TCP port 23.

TFTP
The Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) is a protocol for doing simple file transfers over UDP to get a file
from or put a file onto a remote host. TFTP servers and clients use UDP port 69.

Install curl

curl is totally free, open and available. There are numerous ways to get it and install it for most operating
systems and architecture. This section will give you some answers to start with, but will not be a complete
reference.

Some operating systems ship curl by default. Some do not.

In addition, You can always download the source from curl.se or find binary packages to download from
there.

Linux
Windows
macOS
Docker
Linux

Linux distributions come with "packager managers" that let you install software that they offer. Most Linux
distributions offer curl and libcurl to be installed if they are not installed by default.

Ubuntu and Debian

apt is a tool to install prebuilt packages on Debian Linux and Ubuntu Linux distributions and derivatives.

To install the curl command-line tool, you usually just

apt install curl

…and that then makes sure the dependencies are installed and usually libcurl is then also installed as an
individual package.

If you want to build applications against libcurl, you need a development package installed to get the include
headers and some additional documentation, etc. You can then select a libcurl with the TLS backend you
prefer:

apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev

or

apt install libcurl4-nss-dev

or

apt install libcurl4-gnutls-dev

Redhat and CentOS

With Redhat Linux and CentOS Linux derivatives, you use yum to install packages. Install the command-
line tool with:

yum install curl

You install the libcurl development package (with include files and some docs, etc.) with this:
 yum install libcurl-devel

nix
Nix is a package manager default to the NixOS distribution, but it can also be used on any Linux distribution.

In order to install command-line tool:

nix-env -i curl

Arch Linux
curl is located in the core repository of Arch Linux. This means it should be installed automatically if you
follow the normal installation procedure.

If curl is not installed, Arch Linux uses pacman to install packages:

pacman -S curl

SUSE and openSUSE

With SUSE Linux and openSUSE Linux you use zypper to install install packages. To install the curl
command-line utility:

zypper install curl

In order to install the libcurl development package you run:

zypper install libcurl-devel

SUSE SLE Micro and openSUSE MicroOS

These versions of SUSE/openSUSE Linux are immutable OSes and have a read only root file system, to
install packages you would use transactional-update instead of zypper . To install the curl
command-line utility:
 transactional-update pkg install curl

And to install the libcurl development package:

transactional-update pkg install libcurl-devel

Windows

Windows 10 comes with the curl tool bundled with the operating system since version 1804. If you have an
older Windows version or just want to upgrade to the latest version shipped by the curl project, download the
latest official curl release for Windows from curl.se/windows and install that.

There are several different ways to get curl and libcurl onto your Windows systems:

1. MSYS2
2. vcpkg

MSYS2

MSYS2 is a popular build system for Windows based on mingw-w64 and includes both gcc and clang
compilers. MSYS2 uses a package manager named pacman (a port from arch-linux) and has about 2000
precompiled mingw-packages. MSYS2 is designed to build standalone software: the binaries built with
mingw-w64 compilers do not depend on MSYS2 itself[^1].

Get curl and libcurl on MSYS2

Current information about the mingw-w64-curl package can be found on the msys2 website:
https://packages.msys2.org/base/mingw-w64-curl. Here we can also find installation instructions for the
various available flavors. For example to install the default x64 binary for curl we run:

pacman -Sy mingw-w64-x86_64-curl

This package contains both the curl command line tool as well as libcurl headers and shared libraries.
The default curl packages are built with the OpenSSL backend and hence depend on mingw-w64-
x86_64-openssl . There are also mingw-w64-x86_64-curl-gnutls and mingw-w64-x86_64-
curl-gnutls packages, refer to the msys2 website for more details.

Just like on Linux, we can use pkg-config to query the flags needed to build against libcurl. Start msys2
using the mingw64 shell (which automatically sets the path to include /mingw64 ) and run:

pkg-config --cflags libcurl

 # -IC:/msys64/mingw64/include

pkg-config --libs libcurl

# -LC:/msys64/mingw64/lib -lcurl

The pacman package manager installs precompiled binaries. Next up we explain how to use pacman to
build curl locally, for example to customize the configuration.

Building libcurl on MSYS2

Building packages with pacman is almost just as simple as installing. The entire process is contained in the
PKGBUILD file from the mingw-w64-curl package. We can easily modify the file to rebuild the package
ourselves.

If we start with a clean msys2 installation, we first want to install some build tools, like autoconf , patch
and git . Start the msys2 shell and run:

# Sync the repositories

pacman -Syu

# Install git, autoconf, patch, etc

pacman -S git base-devel

# Install GCC for x86_64

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain

Now clone the mingw-packages repository and go to the mingw-w64-curl package:

git clone https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages

cd MINGW-packages/mingw-w64-curl

This directory contains the PKGBUILD file and patches that are used for building curl. Have a look at the
PKGBUILD file to see what is going on. Now to compile it, we can do:

makepkg-mingw --syncdeps --skippgpcheck

That is it. The --syncdeps parameter will automatically check and prompt to install dependencies of
mingw-w64-curl if these are not yet installed. Once the process is complete you will have 3 new files in
the current directory, for example:

pacman -U mingw-w64-x86_64-curl-7.80.0-1-any.pkg.tar.zst

pacman -U mingw-w64-x86_64-curl-gnutls-7.80.0-1-any.pkg.tar.zst

pacman -U mingw-w64-x86_64-curl-winssl-7.80.0-1-any.pkg.tar.zst
Use the pacman u command to install such a local package file:

pacman -U mingw-w64-x86_64-curl-winssl-7.80.0-1-any.pkg.tar.zst

Have a look at the msys2 docs or join the gitter to learn more about building with pacman and msys2!

[^1]: Be careful not to confuse the mingw-package mingw-w64-curl with the msys-packages curl and
curl-devel . The latter are part of msys2 environment itself (e.g. to support pacman downloads), but not
suitable for redistribution. To build redistributable software that does not depend on MSYS2 itself, you
always need mingw-w64-… packages and toolchains.

vcpkg

Vcpkg helps you manage C and C++ libraries on Windows, Linux and MacOS.

There is no "curl" package on vcpkg, only libcurl.

Install libcurl

vcpkg.exe install curl:x64-windows

macOS

macOS comes with the curl tool bundled with the operating system since many years. If you want to upgrade
to the latest version shipped by the curl project, we recommend installing homebrew (a macOS software
package manager) and then install the curl package from them:

brew install curl

Get libcurl for macOS

A popular and easy way to get libcurl installed for macOS is to use homebrew and then run this simple
command in a terminal:

brew install libcurl

Docker

The docker image is hosted at https://hub.docker.com/r/curlimages/curl

You can run the latest version of curl with the following command:

docker run -it --rm curlimages/curl www.example.com

Running curl seamlessly in docker

It is possible to make an alias to seamlessly run curl inside a container. Define an alias like the following:

# Bash alias example

alias curl='docker run -it --rm curlimages/curl'

And simply invoke curl www.example.com to make a request

Running curl in kubernetes

Sometimes it can be useful to troubleshoot k8s networking with curl, just like :

kubectl run -i --tty curl --image=curlimages/curl --restart=Never -- "-m 5" www.example.com

Source code

The source code is, of course, the actual engine parts of this project. After all, it is a software project.

curl and libcurl are written in C.

Hosting and download

You can always find the source code for the latest curl and libcurl release on the official curl website curl.se.
There are also checksums and digital signatures provided to help you verify that what ends up on your local
system when you download the files, are the same bytes in the same order as were originally uploaded
there by the curl team.

If you would rather work directly with the curl source code off the source code repository, you find all details
in the curl GitHub repository.
Clone the code

git clone https://github.com/curl/curl.git

This will get the latest curl code downloaded and unpacked in a directory on your local system.

Open Source

What is Open Source

Generally, Open Source software is software that can be freely accessed, used, changed, and shared (in
modified or unmodified form) by anyone. Open Source software is typically made by many people, and
distributed under licenses that comply with the definition.

Free Software is an older and related term that mostly says the same thing for all our intents and purposes,
but we stick to the term Open Source in this document for simplicity.

License

curl and libcurl are distributed under an Open Source license known as a MIT license derivative. It is short,
simple and easy to grasp. It follows here in full:

COPYRIGHT AND PERMISSION NOTICE

Copyright © 1996 - 2022, Daniel Stenberg, <[email protected]>, and many

contributors, see the THANKS file.

All rights reserved.

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose
with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright
notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS. IN
NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM,
DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR
OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE
OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
 Except as contained in this notice, the name of a copyright holder shall not
be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings
in this Software without prior written authorization of the copyright holder.

This is legalese that says you are allowed to change the code, redistribute the code, redistribute binaries
built from the code and build proprietary code with it, without anyone requiring you to give any changes back
to the project—but you may not claim that you wrote it.

Early on in the project we iterated over a few different other licenses before we settled on this. We started
out GPL, then tried MPL and landed on this MIT derivative. We will never change the license again.

Copyright and Legal

Copyright is a legal right granted by the law of a country that gives the creator of an original work exclusive
rights for its use and distribution.

The copyright owner(s) can agree to allow others to use their work by licensing it. That is what we do in the
curl project. The copyright is the foundation on which the licensing works.

Daniel Stenberg is the owner of most copyrights in the curl project.

Independent
A lot of Open Source projects are run within umbrella organizations. Such organizations include the GNU
project, the Apache Software Foundation, a larger company that funds the project or similar. The curl project
is not part of any such larger organization but is completely independent and free.

No company controls curl's destiny and the curl project does not need to follow any umbrella organization's
guidelines.

curl is not a formal company, organization or a legal entity of any kind. curl is just an informal collection of
humans, distributed across the globe, who work together on a software project.

Legal
The curl project obeys national laws of the countries in which it works. However, it is a highly visible
international project, downloadable and usable in effectively every country on earth, so some local laws
could be broken when using curl. That is just the nature of it and if uncertain, you should check your own
local situation.

There have been law suits involving technology that curl provides. One such case known to the author of
this was a patent case in the US that insisted they had the rights to resumed file transfers.

As a generic software component that is usable everywhere to everyone, there are times when libcurl—in
particular—is used in nefarious or downright malicious ways. Examples include being used in virus and
malware software That is unfortunate but nothing we can prevent

Code layout

The curl source code tree is neither large nor complicated. A key thing to remember is, that libcurl is the
library and that this library is the biggest component of the curl command-line tool.

root
We try to keep the number of files in the source tree root to a minimum. You will see a slight difference in
files if you check a release archive compared to what is stored in the git repository as several files are
generated by the release scripts.

Some of the more notable ones include:

buildconf : used to build configure and more when building curl from source out of the git repository.

buildconf.bat : the Windows version of buildconf. Run this after having checked out the full source
code from git.

CHANGES : generated at release and put into the release archive. It contains the 1000 latest changes to
the source repository.

configure : a generated script that is used on Unix-like systems to generate a setup when building
curl.

COPYING : the license detailing the rules for your using the code.

GIT-INFO : only present in git and contains information about how to build curl after having checked
out the code from git.

maketgz : the script used to produce release archives and daily snapshots

README : a short summary of what curl and libcurl are.

RELEASE-NOTES : contains the changes done for the latest release; when found in git it contains the
changes done since the previous release that are destined to end up in the coming release.

lib
This directory contains the full source code for libcurl. It is the same source code for all platforms—over one
hundred C source files and a few more private header files. The header files used when building
applications against libcurl are not stored in this directory; see include/curl for those.

Depending on what features are enabled in your own build and what functions your platform provides, some
of the source files or portions of the source files may contain code that is not used in your particular build.
lib/vtls
The VTLS sub section within libcurl is the home of all the TLS backends libcurl can be built to support. The
"virtual" TLS internal API is a backend agnostic API used internally to access TLS and crypto functions
without the main code knowing which specific TLS library is used. This allows the person who builds libcurl
to select from a wide variety TLS libraries to build with.

We also maintain a SSL comparison table on the website to aid users.

AmiSSL: an OpenSSL fork made for AmigaOS (uses openssl.c )

BearSSL

BoringSSL: an OpenSSL fork maintained by Google. (uses openssl.c )

GnuTLS
GSKit: the native TLS library on OS/400.

LibreSSL: an OpenSSL fork maintained by the OpenBSD team. (uses openssl.c )

mbedTLS

NSS: TLS library most known for being used by the Firefox web browser.

OpenSSL
rustls: a TLS library written in rust
Schannel: the native TLS library on Windows.

Secure Transport: the native TLS library on macOS

wolfSSL

src
This directory holds the source code for the curl command-line tool. It is the same source code for all
platforms that run the tool.

Most of what the command-line tool does is to convert given command line options into the corresponding
libcurl options or set of options and then makes sure to issue them correctly to drive the network transfer
according to the user's wishes.

This code uses libcurl just as any other application would.

include/curl
Here are the public header files that are provided for libcurl-using applications. Some of them are generated
at configure or release time so they do not look identical in the git repository as they do in a release archive.
With modern libcurl, all an application is expected to include in its C source code is #include
<curl/curl.h>

docs
The main documentation location. Text files in this directory are typically plain text files. We have slowly
started to move towards Markdown format so a few (but growing number of) files use the .md extension to
signify that.

Most of these documents are also shown on the curl website automatically converted from text to a web
friendly format/look.

BINDINGS : lists all known libcurl language bindings and where to find them

BUGS : how to report bugs and where

CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md : how we expect people to behave in this project

CONTRIBUTE : what to think about when contributing to the project

curl.1 : the curl command-line tool man page, in nroff format

curl-config.1 : the curl-config man page, in nroff format

FAQ : frequently asked questions about various curl-related subjects

FEATURES : an incomplete list of curl features

HISTORY : describes how the project started and has evolved over the years

HTTP2.md : how to use HTTP/2 with curl and libcurl

HTTP-COOKIES : how curl supports and works with HTTP cookies

index.html : a basic HTML page as a documentation index page

INSTALL : how to build and install curl and libcurl from source

INSTALL.cmake : how to build curl and libcurl with CMake

INSTALL.devcpp : how to build curl and libcurl with devcpp

INTERNALS : details curl and libcurl internal structures

KNOWN_BUGS : list of known bugs and problems

LICENSE-MIXING : describes how to combine different third party modules and their individual
licenses

MAIL-ETIQUETTE : this is how to communicate on our mailing lists

MANUAL : a tutorial-like guide on how to use curl

mk-ca-bundle.1 : the mk-ca-bundle tool man page, in nroff format

README.cmake : CMake details

README.netware : Netware details

README.win32 : win32 details

 RELEASE-PROCEDURE : how to do a curl and libcurl release
RESOURCES : further resources for further reading on what, why and how curl does things

ROADMAP.md : what we want to work on in the future

SECURITY : how we work on security vulnerabilities

SSLCERTS : TLS certificate handling documented

SSL-PROBLEMS : common SSL problems and their causes

THANKS : thanks to this extensive list of friendly people, curl exists today!

TheArtOfHttpScripting : a tutorial into HTTP scripting with curl

TODO : things we or you can work on implementing

VERSIONS : how the version numbering of libcurl works

docs/libcurl

All libcurl functions have their own man pages in individual files with .3 extensions, using nroff format, in this
directory. There are also a few other files that are described below.

ABI

index.html

libcurl.3

libcurl-easy.3

libcurl-errors.3

libcurl.m4

libcurl-multi.3

libcurl-share.3

libcurl-thread.3

libcurl-tutorial.3

symbols-in-versions

docs/libcurl/opts
This directory contains the man pages for the individual options for three different libcurl functions.

curl_easy_setopt() options start with CURLOPT_ , curl_multi_setopt() options start with

CURLMOPT_ and curl_easy_getinfo() options start with CURLINFO_ .
docs/examples
Contains around 100 stand-alone examples that are meant to help readers understand how libcurl can be
used.

See also the libcurl examples section of this book.

scripts
Handy scripts.

contributors.sh : extracts all contributors from the git repository since a given hash/tag. The
purpose is to generate a list for the RELEASE-NOTES file and to allow manually added names to
remain in there even on updates. The script uses the THANKS-filter file to rewrite some names.

contrithanks.sh : extracts contributors from the git repository since a given hash/tag, filters out all
the names that are already mentioned in THANKS , and then outputs THANKS to stdout with the list of
new contributors appended at the end; it's meant to allow easier updates of the THANKS document. The
script uses the THANKS-filter file to rewrite some names.

log2changes.pl : generates the CHANGES file for releases, as used by the release script. It simply
converts git log output.

zsh.pl : helper script to provide curl command-line completions to users of the zsh shell.

Handling build options

The curl and libcurl source code has been carefully written to build and run on virtually every computer
platform in existence. This can only be done through hard work and by adhering to a few guidelines (and, of
course, a fair amount of testing).

A golden rule is to always add #ifdefs that checks for specific features, and then have the setup scripts
(configure or CMake or hard-coded) check for the presence of said features in a user's computer setup
before the program is compiled there. Additionally and as a bonus, thanks to this way of writing the code,
some features can be explicitly turned off even if they are present in the system and could be used.
Examples of that would be when users want to, for example, build a version of the library with a smaller
footprint or with support for certain protocols disabled, etc.

The project sometimes uses #ifdef protection around entire source files when, for example, a single file is
provided for a specific operating system or perhaps for a specific feature that is not always present. This is to
make it possible for all platforms to always build all files—it simplifies the build scripts and makefiles a lot. A
file entirely #ifdefed out hardly adds anything to the build time, anyway.

Rather than sprinkling the code with #ifdefs, to the extent where it is possible, we provide functions and
macros that make the code look and work the same, independent of present features. Some of those are
then empty macros for the builds that lack the features.
Both TLS handling and name resolving are handled with an internal API that hides the specific
implementation and choice of 3rd party software library. That way, most of the internals work the same
independent of which TLS library or name resolving system libcurl is told to use.

Code style

Source code that has a common style is easier to read than code that uses different styles in different
places. It helps making the code feel like one continuous code base. Easy-to-read is a important property of
code and helps make it easier to review when new things are added and it helps debugging code when
developers are trying to figure out why things go wrong. A unified style is more important than individual
contributors having their own personal tastes satisfied.

Our C code has a few style rules. Most of them are verified and upheld by the checksrc.pl script.
Invoked with make checksrc or even by default by the build system when built after ./configure --
enable-debug has been used.

It is normally not a problem for anyone to follow the guidelines as you just need to copy the style already
used in the source code, and there are no particularly unusual rules in our set of rules.

We also work hard on writing code that is warning-free on all the major platforms and in general on as many
platforms as possible. Code that obviously will cause warnings will not be accepted as-is.

Naming
Try using a non-confusing naming scheme for your new functions and variable names. It does not
necessarily have to mean that you should use the same as in other places of the code, just that the names
should be logical, understandable and be named according to what they are used for. File-local functions
should be made static. We like lower case names.

All symbols meant for public use must start with curl . Global internal symbols start with Curl .

Indentation
We use only spaces for indentation, never TABs. We use two spaces for each new open brace.

if(something_is_true) {
while(second_statement == fine) {
moo();
}
}
Comments
Since we write C89 code, // comments are not allowed. They were not introduced in the C standard until
C99. We use only /* comments */ .

/* this is a comment */

Long lines
Source code in curl may never be wider than 79 columns. There are two reasons for maintaining this even in
the modern era of large and high resolution screens:

1. Narrower columns are easier to read than wide ones. There is a reason newspapers have used
columns for decades or centuries.
2. Narrower columns allow developers to more easily view multiple pieces of code next to each other in
different windows. I often have two or three source code windows next to each other on the same
screen, as well as multiple terminal and debugging windows.

Braces
In if/while/do/for expressions, we write the open brace on the same line as the keyword and we then set the
closing brace on the same indentation level as the initial keyword. Like this:

if(age < 40) {

/* clearly a youngster */
}

You may omit the braces if they would contain only a one-line statement:

if(!x)
continue;

For functions the opening brace should be on a separate line:

int main(int argc, char **argv)

{
return 1;
}
else on the following line
When adding an else clause to a conditional expression using braces, we add it on a new line after the
closing brace. Like this:

if(age < 40) {

/* clearly a youngster */
}
else {
/* probably intelligent */
}

No space before parentheses

When writing expressions using if/while/do/for, there shall be no space between the keyword and the open
parenthesis. Like this:

while(1) {
/* loop forever */
}

Use boolean conditions

Rather than test a conditional value such as a bool against TRUE or FALSE, a pointer against NULL or !=
NULL and an int against zero or not zero in if/while conditions we prefer:

result = do_something();
if(!result) {
/* something went wrong */
return result;
}

No assignments in conditions
To increase readability and reduce complexity of conditionals, we avoid assigning variables within if/while
conditions. We frown upon this style:

if((ptr = malloc(100)) == NULL)

return NULL;
and instead we encourage the above version to be spelled out more clearly:

ptr = malloc(100);
if(!ptr)
return NULL;

New block on a new line

We never write multiple statements on the same source line, even for short if() conditions.

if(a)
return TRUE;
else if(b)
return FALSE;

and NEVER:

if(a) return TRUE;

else if(b) return FALSE;

Space around operators

Please use spaces on both sides of operators in C expressions. Postfix (), [], ->, ., ++, -- and Unary +, -, !, ~,
& operators excluded they should have no space.

Examples:

bla = func();
who = name[0];
age += 1;
true = !false;
size += -2 + 3 * (a + b);
ptr->member = a++;
struct.field = b--;
ptr = &address;
contents = *pointer;
complement = ~bits;
empty = (!*string) ? TRUE : FALSE;
No parentheses for return values
We use the 'return' statement without extra parentheses around the value:

int works(void)
{
return TRUE;
}

Parentheses for sizeof arguments

When using the sizeof operator in code, we prefer it to be written with parentheses around its argument:

int size = sizeof(int);

Column alignment
Some statements cannot be completed on a single line because the line would be too long, the statement
too hard to read, or due to other style guidelines above. In such a case the statement will span multiple lines.

If a continuation line is part of an expression or sub-expression then you should align on the appropriate
column so that it's easy to tell what part of the statement it is. Operators should not start continuation lines. In
other cases follow the 2-space indent guideline. Here are some examples from libcurl:

if(Curl_pipeline_wanted(handle->multi, CURLPIPE_HTTP1) &&

(handle->set.httpversion != CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_0) &&
(handle->set.httpreq == HTTPREQ_GET ||
handle->set.httpreq == HTTPREQ_HEAD))
/* did not ask for HTTP/1.0 and a GET or HEAD */
return TRUE;

If no parenthesis, use the default indent:

data->set.http_disable_hostname_check_before_authentication =
(0 != va_arg(param, long)) ? TRUE : FALSE;

Function invoke with an open parenthesis:

if(option) {
result = parse_login_details(option, strlen(option),
(userp ? &user : NULL),
(passwdp ? &passwd : NULL),
 NULL);
}

Align with the "current open" parenthesis:

DEBUGF(infof(data, "Curl_pp_readresp_ %d bytes of trailing "

"server response left\n",
(int)clipamount));

Platform dependent code

Use #ifdef HAVE_FEATURE to do conditional code. We avoid checking for particular operating systems or
hardware in the #ifdef lines. The HAVE_FEATURE shall be generated by the configure script for unix-like
systems and they are hard-coded in the config-[system].h files for the others.

We also encourage use of macros/functions that possibly are empty or defined to constants when libcurl is
built without that feature, to make the code seamless. Like this example where the magic() function works
differently depending on a build-time conditional:

#ifdef HAVE_MAGIC
void magic(int a)
{
return a + 2;
}
#else
#define magic(x) 1
#endif

int content = magic(3);

No typedefed structs
Use structs by all means, but do not typedef them. Use the struct name way of identifying them:

struct something {
void *valid;
size_t way_to_write;
};
struct something instance;

Not okay:

typedef struct {
 void *wrong;
size_t way_to_write;
} something;

something instance;

Contributing

Contributing means helping out.

When you contribute anything to the project—code, documentation, bug fixes, suggestions or just good
advice—we assume you do this with permission and you are not breaking any contracts or laws by
providing that to us. If you do not have permission, do not contribute it to us.

Contributing to a project like curl could be many different things. While source code is the stuff that is
needed to build the products, we are also depending on good documentation, testing (both test code and
test infrastructure), web content, user support and more.

Send your changes or suggestions to the team and by working together we can fix problems, improve
functionality, clarify documentation, add features or make anything else you help out with land in the proper
place. We will make sure improved code and docs get merged into the source tree properly and other sorts
of contributions are suitable received.

Send your contributions on a mailing list, file an issue or submit a pull request.

Suggestions
Ideas are easy, implementations are hard. Yes, we do appreciate good ideas and suggestions of what to do
and how to do it, but the chances that the ideas actually turn into real features grow substantially if you also
volunteer to participate in converting the idea into reality.

We already gather ideas in the TODO document and we are generally aware of the current trends in the
popular networking protocols so there is usually no need to remind us about those.

What to add
The best approach to add anything to curl or libcurl is, of course, to first bring the idea and suggestion to the
curl project team members and then discuss with them if the idea is feasible for inclusion and then how an
implementation is best done—and done in the best possible way to get merged into the source code
repository, assuming that is what you want.

The project generally approves functions that improve the support for the current protocols, especially
features that popular clients or browsers have but that curl still lacks.
Of course, you can also add contents to the project that is not code, like documentation, graphics or website
contents, but the general rules apply equally to that.
If you are fixing a problem you have or a problem that others are reporting, we will be thrilled to receive your
fix and merge it as soon as possible,

What not to add

There are no good rules that say what features you can or cannot add or that we will never accept, but let me
instead try to mention a few things you should avoid to get less friction and to be successful, faster:

Do not write up a huge patch first and then send it to the list for discussion. Always start out by
discussing on the list, and send your initial review requests early to get feedback on your design and
approach. It saves you from wasting time going down a route that might need rewriting in the end
anyway.
When introducing things in the code, you need to follow the style and architecture that already exists.
When you add code to the ordinary transfer code path, it must, for example, work asynchronously in a
non-blocking manner. We will not accept new code that introduces blocking behaviors—we already
have too many of those that we have not managed to remove yet.
Quick hacks or dirty solutions that have a high risk of not working on platforms you do not run or on
architectures you do not know. We do not care if you are in a hurry or that it works for you. We do not
accept high risk code or code that is hard to read or understand.

Code that breaks the build. Sure, we accept that we sometimes have to add code to certain areas that
makes the new functionality perhaps depend on a specific 3rd party library or a specific operating
system and similar, but we can never do that at the expense of all other systems. We do not break the
build, and we make sure all tests keep running successfully.

git
Our preferred source control tool is git.

While git is sometimes not the easiest tool to learn and master, all the basic steps a casual developer and
contributor needs to know are straight-forward and do not take much time or effort to learn.

This book will not help you learn git. All software developers in this day and age should learn git anyway.

The curl git tree can be browsed with a web browser on our GitHub page at https://github.com/curl/curl.

To check out the curl source code from git, you can clone it like this:

git clone https://github.com/curl/curl.git

Pull request
A popular and convenient way to make your own changes and contribute them back to the project is by
doing a so-called pull request on GitHub.

First, you create your own version of the source tree, called a fork, on the Github website. That way you get
your own version of the curl git tree that you can clone to a local copy.

You edit your own local copy, commit the changes, push them to the git repository on Github and then on the
Github website you can select to create a pull request based on your changes done to your local repository
clone of the original curl repository.

We recommend doing your work meant for a pull request in a dedicated separate branch and not in master,
just to make it easier for you to update a pull request, like after review, for example, or if you realize it was a
dead end and you decide to just throw it away.

Make a patch for the mailing list

Even if you opt to not make a pull request but prefer the old fashioned and trusted method of sending a patch
to the curl-library mailing list, it is still a good practice to work in a local git branch and commit your changes
there.

A branch makes it easy to edit and rebase when you need to change things and it makes it easy to keep
syncing to the master branch when things are updated upstream.

Once your commits are fine enough to get sent to the mailing list, you just create patches with git
format-patch and send them away. Even more fancy users go directly to git send-email and have
git send the email itself.

git commit style

When you commit a patch to git, you give it a commit message that describes the change you are
committing. We have a certain style in the project that we ask you to use:

[area]: [short line describing the main effect]

[separate the above single line from the rest with an empty line]

[full description, no wider than 72 columns that describes as much as

possible as to why this change is made, and possibly what things

it fixes and everything else that is related]

[Bug: link to source of the report or more related discussion]

[Reported-by: John Doe—credit the reporter]
[whatever-else-by: credit all helpers, finders, doers]
Do not forget to use git commit --author="Jane Doe <[email protected]>" if you commit
someone else's work, and make sure that you have your own Github username and email setup correctly in
git before you commit via commands below:

git config --global user.name "johndoe"

git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

The author and the *-by: lines are, of course, there to make sure we give the proper credit in the project. We
do not want to take someone else's work without clearly attributing where it comes from. Giving correct credit
is of utmost importance.

Who decides what goes in?

First, it might not be obvious to everyone but there is, of course, only a limited set of people that can actually
merge commits into the actual official git repository. Let's call them the core team.

Everyone else can fork off their own curl repository to which they can commit and push changes and host
them online and build their own curl versions from and so on, but in order to get changes into the official
repository they need to be pushed by a trusted person.

The core team is a small set of curl developers who have been around for several years and have shown
they are skilled developers and that they fully comprehend the values and the style of development we do in
this project. They are some of the people listed in the The development team section.

You can always bring a discussion to the mailing list and argue why you think your changes should get
accepted, or perhaps even object to other changes that are getting in and so forth. You can even suggest
yourself or someone else to be given "push rights" and become one of the selected few in that team.

Daniel remains the project leader and while it is rarely needed, he has the final say in debates that do not
seem to sway in either direction or fail to reach consensus.

Reporting vulnerabilities

All known and public curl or libcurl related vulnerabilities are listed on the curl website security page.

Security vulnerabilities should not be entered in the project's public bug tracker unless the necessary
configuration is in place to limit access to the issue to only the reporter and the project's security team.

Vulnerability handling
The typical process for handling a new security vulnerability is as follows.

No information should be made public about a vulnerability until it is formally announced at the end of this
process. That means, for example, that a bug tracker entry must NOT be created to track the issue since that
will make the issue public and it should not be discussed on any of the project's public mailing lists. Also
messages associated with any commits should not make any reference to the security nature of the commit
if done prior to the public announcement.

The person discovering the issue, the reporter, reports the vulnerability on https://hackerone.com/curl.
Issues filed there reach a handful of selected and trusted people.

Messages that do not relate to the reporting or managing of an undisclosed security vulnerability in curl
or libcurl are ignored and no further action is required.

A person in the security team sends an email to the original reporter to acknowledge the report.
The security team investigates the report and either rejects it or accepts it.

If the report is rejected, the team writes to the reporter to explain why.
If the report is accepted, the team writes to the reporter to let him/her know it is accepted and that they
are working on a fix.

The security team discusses the problem, works out a fix, considers the impact of the problem and
suggests a release schedule. This discussion should involve the reporter as much as possible.

The release of the information should be "as soon as possible" and is most often synced with an
upcoming release that contains the fix. If the reporter, or anyone else, thinks the next planned release is
too far away then a separate earlier release for security reasons should be considered.
Write a security advisory draft about the problem that explains what the problem is, its impact, which
versions it affects, any solutions or workarounds and when the fix was released, making sure to credit all
contributors properly.
Request a CVE number (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) using HackerOne's form for this
purpose.

Update the "security advisory" with the CVE number.

Consider informing distros@openwall to prepare them about the upcoming public security vulnerability
announcement - attach the advisory draft for information. Note that 'distros' do not accept an embargo
longer than 14 days and they do not care for Windows-specific flaws.
The security team commits the fix in a private branch. The commit message should ideally contain the
CVE number. This fix is usually also distributed to the 'distros' mailing list to allow them to use the fix
prior to the public announcement.
At the day of the next release, the private branch is merged into the master branch and pushed. Once
pushed, the information is accessible to the public and the actual release should follow suit immediately
afterwards.
The project team creates a release that includes the fix.
The project team announces the release and the vulnerability to the world in the same manner we
always announce releases—it gets sent to the curl-announce, curl-library and curl-users mailing lists.
The security web page on the website should get the new vulnerability mentioned.

[email protected]
Who is on this list? There are a couple of criteria you must meet, and then we might ask you to join the list or
you can ask to join it. It really is not formal. We only require that you have a long-term presence in the curl
project and you have shown an understanding for the project and its way of working. You must have been
around for a good while and you should have no plans on vanishing in the near future.

We do not make the list of participants public mostly because it tends to vary somewhat over time and a list
somewhere will only risk getting outdated.

Website

Most of the curl website is also available in a public git repository, although separate from the source code
repository since it generally is not interesting to the same people and we can maintain a different list of
people that have push rights, etc.

The website git repository is available on GitHub at this URL: https://github.com/curl/curl-www and you can
clone a copy of the web code like this:

git clone https://github.com/curl/curl-www.git

Building the web

The website is a custom-made setup that mostly builds static HTML files from a set of source files. The
source files are preprocessed with what is a souped-up C preprocessor called fcpp and a set of perl scripts.
The man pages get converted to HTML with roffit. Make sure fcpp, perl, roffit, make and curl are all in your
$PATH.

Once you have cloned the git repository the first time, invoke sh bootstrap.sh once to get a symlink
and some initial local files setup, and then you can build the website locally by invoking make in the source
root tree.

Note that this does not make you a complete website mirror, as some scripts and files are only available on
the real actual site, but should give you enough to let you view most HTML pages locally.

Run a local clone

The website is built in a way that makes it easy and convenient to host a local copy for browsing and testing
changes before we push them to the official site in production. We then recommend you call the site
curl.local and add that as an entry in your local /etc/hosts file. Then point the document root of
your HTTP server to the curl-www source code root.
Website infrastructure

The public curl website is hosted at curl.se.

The domain name is owned by Daniel Stenberg

The main origin machine is sponsored by Haxx

The curl.se domain is served by anycast distributed DNS servers sponsored by Kirei

The site is delivered to the world via a CDN run by Fastly

The website updates itself from GitHub every N minutes. The CDN front-ends cache content for Y
minutes (different types cache content different times)

Build curl

The source code for this project is written in a way that allows it to get compiled and built on just about any
operating system and platform, with as few restraints and requirements as possible.

If you have a 32bit (or larger) CPU architecture, if you have a C89 compliant compiler and if you have
roughly a POSIX supporting sockets API, then you can most likely build curl and libcurl for your target
system.

For the most popular platforms, the curl project comes with build systems already done and prepared to
allow you to easily build it yourself.

There are also friendly people and organizations who put together binary packages of curl and libcurl and
make them available for download. The different options will be explored below.

The latest version?

Looking at the curl website, you can see the latest curl and libcurl version released from the project. That is
the latest source code release package you can get.

When you opt for a prebuilt and prepackaged version for your operating system or distribution of choice, you
may not always find the latest version but you might have to either be satisfied with the latest version
someone has packaged for your environment, or you need to build it yourself from source.

The curl project also provides info about the latest version in a somewhat more machine-readable format on
this URL: https://curl.se/info .

Releases source code

The curl project creates source code that can be built to produce the two products curl and libcurl. The
conversion from source code to binaries is often referred to as "building". You build curl and libcurl from
source.
The curl project does not provide any built binaries at all — it only ships the source code. The binaries
which can be found on the download page of the curl web and installed from other places on the Internet are
all built and provided to the world by other friendly people and organizations.

The source code consists of a large number of files containing C code. Generally speaking, the same set of
files are used to build binaries for all platforms and computer architectures that curl supports. curl can be
built and run on a vast number of platforms. If you use a rare operating system yourself, chances are that
building curl from source is the easiest or perhaps the only way to get curl.

Making it easy to build curl is a priority to the curl project, although we do not always necessarily succeed!

git vs release tarballs

When release tarballs are created, a few files are generated and included in the final release bundle. Those
generated files are not present in the git repository, because they are generated and there is no need to
store them in git.

Of course, can also opt to build the latest version that exist in the git repository. It could however be a bit
more fragile and probably requires slightly more attention to detail.

If you build curl from a git checkout, you need to generate some files yourself before you can build. On Linux
and Unix-like systems, do this by running ./buildconf and on Windows, run buildconf.bat .

On Linux and Unix-like systems

There are two distinctly different ways to build curl on Linux and other Unix-like systems; there is the one
using the configure script and there is the CMake approach.

There are two different build environments to cater to people's different opinions and tastes. The configure-
based build is arguably the more mature and more encompassing build system and should probably be
considered the default one.

On Windows
On Windows there are at least four different ways to build. The above mentioned ways, the CMake approach
and using configure with msys work, but the more popular and common methods are probably building with
Microsoft's Visual Studio compiler using either nmake or project files. See the build on windows section.

Learn more
 Autotools - build with configure
CMake

On Windows - Windows-specific ways to build

Dependencies
TLS libraries

Autotools

The "Autotools" are a collection of different tools that used together generate the configure script. The
configure script is run by the user who wants to build curl and it does a whole bunch of things:

It checks for features and functions present in your system.

It offers command-line options so that you as a builder can decide what to enable and disable in the
build. Features and protocols, etc., can be toggled on/off, even compiler warning levels and more.

It offers command-line options to let the builder point to specific installation paths for various third-party
dependencies that curl can be built to use.

It specifies on which file path the generated installation should be placed when ultimately the build is
made and "make install" is invoked.

In the most basic usage, just running ./configure in the source directory is enough. When the script
completes, it outputs a summary of what options it has detected/enabled and what features that are still
disabled, some of which possibly because it failed to detect the presence of necessary third-party
dependencies that are needed for those functions to work. If the summary is not what you expected it to be,
invoke configure again with new options or with the previously used options adjusted.

After configure has completed, you invoke make to build the entire thing and then finally make install
to install curl, libcurl and associated things. make install requires that you have the correct rights in
your system to create and write files in the installation directory or you will get some errors.

Cross-compiling
Cross-compiling means that you build the source on one architecture but the output is created to be run on a
different one. For example, you could build the source on a Linux machine but have the output work on a
Windows machine.

For cross-compiling to work, you need a dedicated compiler and build system setup for the particular target
system for which you want to build. How to get and install that system is not covered in this book.

Once you have a cross compiler, you can instruct configure to use that compiler instead of the "native"
compiler when it builds curl so that the end result then can be moved over and used on the other machine.
Static linking
By default, configure will setup the build files so that the following 'make' command will create both shared
and static versions of libcurl. You can change that with the --disable-static or --disable-
shared options to configure.

If you instead want to build with static versions of third party libraries instead of shared libraries, you need to
prepare yourself for an uphill battle. curl's configure script is focused on setting up and building with shared
libraries.

One of the differences between linking with a static library compared to linking with a shared one is in how
shared libraries handle their own dependencies while static ones do not. In order to link with library xyz as
a shared library, it is as basically a matter of adding -lxyz to the linker command line no matter which
other libraries xyz itself was built to use. But, if that xyz is instead a static library we also need to specify
each dependency of xyz on the linker command line. curl's configure cannot keep up with or know all
possible dependencies for all the libraries it can be made to build with, so users wanting to build with static
libs mostly need to provide that list of libraries to link with.

Select TLS backend

The configure-based build offers the user to select from a wide variety of different TLS libraries when
building. You select them by using the correct command line options. Before curl 7.77.0, the configure script
would automatically check for OpenSSL, but modern versions do not.

AmiSSL: --with-amissl

BearSSL: --with-bearssl

BoringSSL: --with-openssl

GnuTLS: --with-gnutls

LibreSSL: --with-openssl

mbedTLS: --with-mbedtls

NSS: --with-nss

OpenSSL: --with-openssl

Rustls: --with-rustls (point to the rustls-ffi install path)

Schannel: --with-schannel

Secure Transport: --with-secure-transport

wolfSSL: --with-wolfssl

If you do not specify which TLS library to use, the configure script will fail. If you want to build without TLS
support, you must explicitly ask for that with --without-ssl .

These --with-* options also allow you to provide the install prefix so that configure will search for the
specific library where you tell it to. Like this:
 ./configure --with-gnutls=/home/user/custom-gnutls

You can opt to build with support for multiple TLS libraries by specifying multiple --with-* options on
the configure command line. Pick which one to make the default TLS backend with --with-default-
ssl-backend=[NAME] . For example, build with support for both GnuTLS and OpenSSL and default to
OpenSSL:

./configure --with-openssl --with-gnutls --with-default-ssl-backend=openssl

Select SSH backend

The configure-based build offers the user to select from a variety of different SSH libraries when building.
You select them by using the correct command-line options.

libssh2: --with-libssh2

libssh: --with-libssh

wolfSSH: --with-wolfssh

These --with-* options also allow you to provide the install prefix so that configure will search for the
specific library where you tell it to. Like this:

./configure --with-libssh2=/home/user/custom-libssh2

Select HTTP/3 backend

The configure-based build offers the user to select different HTTP/3 libraries when building. You select them
by using the correct command-line options.

quiche: --with-quiche

ngtcp2: --with-ngtcp2 --with-nghttp3

CMake

CMake is an alternative build method that works on most modern platforms, including Windows. Using this
method you first need to have cmake installed on your build machine, invoke cmake to generate the build
files and then build. With cmake's -G flag, you select which build system to generate files for. See cmake
--help for the list of "generators" your cmake installation supports.
On the cmake command line, the first argument specifies where to find the cmake source files, which is . (a
single dot) if in the same directory.

To build on Linux using plain make with CMakeLists.txt in the same directory, you can do:

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" .

make

Or rely on the fact that unix makefiles are the default there:

cmake .
make

To create a subdirectory for the build and run make in there:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Windows

You can build curl on Windows in several different ways. We recommend using the MSVC compiler from
Microsoft or the free and open source mingw compiler. The build process is, however, not limited to these.

If you use mingw, you might want to use the autotools build system.

winbuild
This is how to build curl and libcurl using the command line.

Build with MSVC using the nmake utility like this:

cd winbuild

Decide what options to enable/disable in your build. The README.md file in that directly details them all,
but an example command line could look like this (split into several lines for readability):

nmake WITH_SSL=dll WITH_NGHTTP2=dll ENABLE_IPV6=yes \

WITH_ZLIB=dll MACHINE=x64
Visual C++ project files
curl tarballs ship with pre-generated project files that you can load and build curl with.

Project files are provided for several different Visual C++ versions.

To build with VC++, you will of course have to first install VC++ which is part of Visual Studio.

Once you have VC++ installed you should launch the application and open one of the solution or workspace
files. The VC directory names are based on the version of Visual C++ that you will be using. Each version of
Visual Studio has a default version of Visual C++. We offer these versions:

VC10 (Visual Studio 2010 Version 10.0)

VC11 (Visual Studio 2012 Version 11.0)

VC12 (Visual Studio 2013 Version 12.0)
VC14 (Visual Studio 2015 Version 14.0)

VC14.10 (Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.0)

VC14.30 (Visual Studio 2022 Version 17.0)

Separate solutions are provided for both libcurl and the curl command line tool as well as a solution that
includes both projects. libcurl.sln, curl.sln and curl-all.sln, respectively. We recommend using curl-all.sln to
build both projects.

For example, if you are using Visual Studio 2022 then you should be able to use VC14.30\curl-
all.sln to build curl and libcurl.

Running DLL based configurations

If you are a developer and plan to run the curl tool from Visual Studio (eg you are debugging) with any third-
party libraries (such as OpenSSL, wolfSSL or libSSH2) then you will need to add the search path of these
DLLs to the configuration's PATH environment. To do that:

1. Open the 'curl-all.sln' or 'curl.sln' solutions

2. Right-click on the 'curl' project and select Properties
3. Navigate to 'Configuration Properties > Debugging > Environment'

4. Add PATH='Path to
DLL';C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem

... where 'Path to DLL` is the configuration specific path. For example the following configurations in Visual
Studio 2010 might be:

DLL Debug - DLL OpenSSL (Win32):

 PATH=..\..\..\..\..\openssl\build\Win32\VC10\DLL Debug;C:\Windows\system32;
C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem

DLL Debug - DLL OpenSSL (x64):

PATH=..\..\..\..\..\openssl\build\Win64\VC10\DLL Debug;C:\Windows\system32;
C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem

DLL Debug - DLL wolfSSL (Win32):

PATH=..\..\..\..\..\wolfssl\build\Win32\VC10\DLL Debug;C:\Windows\system32;
C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem

DLL Debug - DLL wolfSSL (x64):

PATH=..\..\..\..\..\wolfssl\build\Win64\VC10\DLL Debug;C:\Windows\system32;
C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem

If you are using a configuration that uses multiple third-party library DLLs (such as DLL Debug - DLL
OpenSSL - DLL LibSSH2 ) then Path to DLL will need to contain the path to both of these.

Notes
The following keywords have been used in the directory hierarchy:

<platform> - The platform (For example: Windows)

<ide> - The IDE (For example: VC10)

<architecture> - The platform architecture (For example: Win32, Win64)

<configuration> - The target configuration (For example: DLL Debug, LIB Release - LIB
OpenSSL)

If you are using the source code from the git repository, rather than a release archive or nightly build, you will
need to generate the project files. Please run "generate -help" for usage details.

Should you wish to help out with some of the items on the TODO list, or find bugs in the project files that
need correcting, and would like to submit updated files back then please note that, whilst the solution files
can be edited directly, the templates for the project files (which are stored in the git repository) will need to be
modified rather than the generated project files that Visual Studio uses.

Dependencies
A key to making good software is to build on top of other great software. By using libraries that many others
use, we reinvent the same things fewer times and we get more reliable software as there are more people
using the same code.

A whole slew of features that curl provides require that it is built to use one or more external libraries. They
are then dependencies of curl. None of them are required, but most users will want to use at least some of
them.

HTTP Compression
curl can do automatic decompression of data transferred over HTTP if built with the proper 3rd party
libraries. You can build curl to use one or more of these libraries:

gzip compression with zlib

brotli compression with brotli
zstd compression with libzstd

Getting compressed data over the wire will use less bandwidth, which might also result in shorter transfer
times.

c-ares
https://c-ares.org/

curl can be built with c-ares to be able to do asynchronous name resolution. Another option to enable
asynchronous name resolution is to build curl with the threaded name resolver backend, which will then
instead create a separate helper thread for each name resolve. c-ares does it all within the same thread.

nghttp2
https://nghttp2.org/

This is a library for handling HTTP/2 framing and is a prerequisite for curl to support HTTP version 2.

openldap
https://www.openldap.org/

This library is one option to allow curl to get support for the LDAP and LDAPS URL schemes. On Windows,
you can also opt to build curl to use the winldap library.
librtmp
https://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/

To enable curl's support for the RTMP URL scheme, you must build curl with the librtmp library that comes
from the RTMPDump project.

libpsl
https://rockdaboot.github.io/libpsl/

When you build curl with support for libpsl, the cookie parser will know about the Public Suffix List and thus
handle such cookies appropriately.

libidn2
https://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/libidn2/manual/libidn2.html

curl handles International Domain Names (IDN) with the help of the libidn2 library.

SSH libraries
If you want curl to have SCP and SFTP support, build with one of these SSH libraries:

libssh2
libssh
wolfSSH

TLS libraries
There are many different TLS libraries to choose from, so they are covered in a separate section.

TLS libraries
To make curl support TLS based protocols, such as HTTPS, FTPS, SMTPS, POP3S, IMAPS and more, you
need to build with a third-party TLS library since curl does not implement the TLS protocol itself.

curl is written to work with a large number of TLS libraries:

AmiSSL

BearSSL

BoringSSL

GnuTLS
GSKit (OS/400 specific)

libressl
mbedTLS
NSS

OpenSSL

rustls
Schannel (native Windows)
Secure Transport (native macOS)

WolfSSL

When you build curl and libcurl to use one of these libraries, it is important that you have the library and its
include headers installed on your build machine.

configure
Below, you will learn how to tell configure to use the different libraries. The configure script will not select
any TLS library by default. You must select one, or instruct configure that you want to build without TLS
support using --without-ssl .

OpenSSL, BoringSSL, libressl

./configure --with-openssl

configure will detect OpenSSL in its default path by default. You can optionally point configure to a custom
install path prefix where it can find OpenSSL:

./configure --with-openssl=/home/user/installed/openssl

The alternatives BoringSSL and libressl look similar enough that configure will detect them the same way as
OpenSSL. It then uses additional measures to figure out which of the particular flavors it is using.

GnuTLS
 ./configure --with-gnutls

configure will detect GnuTLS in its default path by default. You can optionally point configure to a custom
install path prefix where it can find gnutls:

./configure --with-gnutls=/home/user/installed/gnutls

NSS

./configure --with-nss

configure will detect NSS in its default path by default. You can optionally point configure to a custom install
path prefix where it can find NSS:

./configure --with-nss=/home/user/installed/nss

WolfSSL

./configure --with-wolfssl

configure will detect WolfSSL in its default path by default. You can optionally point configure to a custom
install path prefix where it can find WolfSSL:

./configure --with-wolfssl=/home/user/installed/wolfssl

mbedTLS

./configure --with-mbedtls

configure will detect mbedTLS in its default path by default. You can optionally point configure to a custom
install path prefix where it can find mbedTLS:

./configure --with-mbedtls=/home/user/installed/mbedtls

Secure Transport

./configure --with-secure-transport

configure will detect Secure Transport in its default path by default. You can optionally point configure to a
custom install path prefix where it can find Secure Transport:

./configure --with-secure-transport=/home/user/installed/darwinssl

Schannel

./configure --with-schannel

configure will detect Schannel in its default path by default.

(WinSSL was previously an alternative name for Schannel, and earlier curl versions instead needed --
with-winssl )

BearSSL

./configure --with-bearssl

configure will detect BearSSL in its default path by default. You can optionally point configure to a custom
install path prefix where it can find BearSSL:

./configure --with-bearssl=/home/user/installed/bearssl

Rustls

./configure --with-rustls

When told to use "rustls", curl is actually trying to find and use the rustls-ffi library - the C API for the rustls
library. configure will detect rustls-ffi in its default path by default. You can optionally point configure to a
custom install path prefix where it can find rustls-ffi:

./configure --with-rustls=/home/user/installed/rustls-ffi

BoringSSL

build boringssl
$HOME/src is where I put the code in this example. You can pick wherever you like.

$ cd $HOME/src
$ git clone https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl
$ cd boringssl
 $ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_POSITION_INDEPENDENT_CODE=on ..
$ make

set up the build tree to get detected by curl's configure

In the boringssl source tree root, make sure there is a lib and an include dir. The lib dir should
contain the two libs (I made them symlinks into the build dir). The include dir is already present by
default. Make and populate lib like this (commands issued in the source tree root, not in the build/
subdirectory).

$ mkdir lib
$ cd lib
$ ln -s ../build/ssl/libssl.a
$ ln -s ../build/crypto/libcrypto.a

configure curl
LIBS=-lpthread ./configure --with-ssl=$HOME/src/boringssl (where I point out the root
of the boringssl tree)

Verify that at the end of the configuration, it says it detected BoringSSL to be used.

build curl
Run make in the curl source tree.

Now you can install curl normally with make install etc.

Command line basics

curl started out as a command-line tool and it has been invoked from shell prompts and from within scripts
by thousands of users over the years. curl has established itself as one of those trusty tools that is there for
you to help you get your work done.

Binaries and different platforms

The command-line tool "curl" is a binary executable file. The curl project does not by itself distribute or
provide binaries. Binary files are highly system specific and oftentimes also bound to specific system
versions.

To get a curl for your platform and your system, you need to get a curl executable from somewhere. Many
people build their own from the source code provided by the curl project, lots of people install it using a
package tool for their operating system and yet another portion of users download binary install packages
from sources they trust.

No matter how you do it, make sure you are getting your version from a trusted source and that you verify
digital signatures or the authenticity of the packages in other ways.

Also, remember that curl is often built to use third-party libraries to perform and unless curl is built to use
them statically you must also have those third-party libraries installed; the exact set of libraries will vary
depending on the particular build you get.

Command lines, quotes and aliases

There are many different command lines, shells and prompts in which curl can be used. They all come with
their own sets of limitations, rules and guidelines to follow. The curl tool is designed to work with any of them
without causing troubles but there may be times when your specific command line system does not match
what others use or what is otherwise documented.

One way that command-line systems differ, for example, is how you can put quotes around arguments such
as to embed spaces or special symbols. In most Unix-like shells you use double quotes (") and single
quotes (') depending if you want to allow variable expansions or not within the quoted string, but on
Windows there is no support for the single quote version.

In some environments, like PowerShell on Windows, the authors of the command line system decided they
know better and "help" the user to use another tool instead of curl when curl is typed, by providing an
alias that takes precedence when a command line is executed. In order to use curl properly with
PowerShell, you need to type in its full name including the extension: "curl.exe".

Different command-line environments will also have different maximum command line lengths and force the
users to limit how large amount of data that can be put into a single line. curl adapts to this by offering a way
to provide command-line options through a file—or from stdin—using the -K option.

Garbage in gives garbage out

curl has little will of its own. It tries to please you and your wishes to a large extent. It also means that it will
try to play with what you give it. If you misspell an option, it might do something unintended. If you pass in a
slightly illegal URL, chances are curl will still deal with it and proceed. It means that you can pass in crazy
data in some options and you can have curl pass on that crazy data in its transfer operation.
This is a design choice, as it allows you to really tweak how curl does its protocol communications and you
can have curl massage your server implementations in the most creative ways.

Command line options

When telling curl to do something, you invoke curl with zero, one or several command-line options to
accompany the URL or set of URLs you want the transfer to be about. curl supports over two hundred
different options.

Short options
Command line options pass on information to curl about how you want it to behave. Like you can ask curl to
switch on verbose mode with the -v option:

curl -v http://example.com

-v is here used as a "short option". You write those with the minus symbol and a single letter immediately
following it. Many options are just switches that switch something on or change something between two
known states. They can be used with just that option name. You can then also combine several single-letter
options after the minus. To ask for both verbose mode and that curl follows HTTP redirects:

curl -vL http://example.com

The command-line parser in curl always parses the entire line and you can put the options anywhere you
like; they can also appear after the URL:

curl http://example.com -Lv

and the two separate short options can of course also be specified separately, like:

curl -v -L http://example.com

Long options
Single-letter options are convenient since they are quick to write and use, but as there are only a limited
number of letters in the alphabet and there are many things to control, not all options are available like that.
Long option names are therefore provided for those. Also, as a convenience and to allow scripts to become
more readable, most short options have longer name aliases.

Long options are always written with two minuses (or dashes, whichever you prefer to call them) and then
the name and you can only write one option name per double-minus. Asking for verbose mode using the
long option format looks like:

curl --verbose http://example.com

and asking for HTTP redirects as well using the long format looks like:

curl --verbose --location http://example.com

Arguments to options
Not all options are just simple boolean flags that enable or disable features. For some of them you need to
pass on data, like perhaps a user name or a path to a file. You do this by writing first the option and then the
argument, separated with a space. Like, for example, if you want to send an arbitrary string of data in an
HTTP POST to a server:

curl -d arbitrary http://example.com

and it works the same way even if you use the long form of the option:

curl --data arbitrary http://example.com

When you use the short options with arguments, you can, in fact, also write the data without the space
separator:

curl -darbitrary http://example.com

Arguments with spaces

At times you want to pass on an argument to an option, and that argument contains one or more spaces. For
example you want to set the user-agent field curl uses to be exactly I am your father , including those
three spaces. Then you need to put quotes around the string when you pass it to curl on the command line.
The exact quotes to use varies depending on your shell/command prompt, but generally it will work with
double quotes in most places:

curl -A "I am your father" http://example.com

Failing to use quotes, like if you would write the command line like this:
 curl -A I am your father http://example.com

… will make curl only use 'I' as a user-agent string, and the following strings, 'am', your, etc will instead all be
treated as separate URLs since they do not start with - to indicate that they are options and curl only ever
handles options and URLs.

To make the string itself contain double quotes, which is common when you for example want to send a
string of JSON to the server, you may need to use single quotes (except on Windows, where single quotes
does not work the same way). Send the JSON string { "name": "Darth" } :

curl -d '{ "name": "Darth" }' http://example.com

Or if you want to avoid the single quote thing, you may prefer to send the data to curl via a file, which then
does not need the extra quoting. Assuming we call the file 'json' that contains the above mentioned data:

curl -d @json http://example.com

Negative options
For options that switch on something, there is also a way to switch it off. You then use the long form of the
option with an initial no- prefix before the name. As an example, to switch off verbose mode:

curl --no-verbose http://example.com

Options depend on version

curl was first typed on a command line back in the glorious year of 1998. It already then worked on the
specified URL and none, one or more command-line options given to it.

Since then we have added more options. We add options as we go along and almost every new release of
curl has one or a few new options that allow users to modify certain aspects of its operation.

With the curl project's rather speedy release chain with a new release shipping every eight weeks, it is
almost inevitable that you are at least not always using the latest released version of curl. Sometimes you
may even use a curl version that is a few years old.

All command-line options described in this book were, of course, added to curl at some point and only a
small portion of them were available that fine spring day in 1998 when curl first shipped. You may have
reason to check your version of curl and crosscheck with the curl man page for when certain options were
added. This is especially important if you want to take a curl command line using a modern curl version back
to an older system that might be running an older installation.

The developers of curl are working hard to not change existing behavior. Command lines written to use curl
in 1998 2003 or 2010 should all be possible to run unmodified even today

URLs

curl is called curl because a substring in its name is URL (Uniform Resource Locator). It operates on URLs.
URL is the name we casually use for the web address strings, like the ones we usually see prefixed with
HTTP:// or starting with www.

URL is, strictly speaking, the former name for these. URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is the more modern
and correct name for them. The syntax is defined in RFC 3986.

Where curl accepts a “URL” as input, it is then really a “URI”. Most of the protocols curl understands also
have a corresponding URI syntax document that describes how that particular URI format works.

curl assumes that you give it a valid URL and it only does limited checks of the format in order to extract the
information it deems necessary to perform its operation. You can, for example, most probably pass in illegal
characters in the URL without curl noticing or caring and it will just pass them on.

Scheme
Name and password

Host
Port number
Path

FTP type
Fragment

Browsers' address bar

Many options and URLs
Connection reuse
Parallel transfers

Scheme

URLs start with the "scheme", which is the official name for the http:// part. That tells which protocol the
URL uses. The scheme must be a known one that this version of curl supports or it will show an error
message and stop. Additionally, the scheme must neither start with nor contain any whitespace.

The scheme separator

The scheme identifier is separated from the rest of the URL by the :// sequence. That is a colon and two
forward slashes. There exists URL formats with only one slash, but curl does not support any of them. There
are two additional notes to be aware of about the number of slashes:
curl allows some illegal syntax and tries to correct it internally; so it will also understand and accept URLs
with one or three slashes, even though they are in fact not properly formed URLs. curl does this because the
browsers started this practice so it has lead to such URLs being used in the wild every now and then.

file:// URLs are written as file://<hostname>/<path> but the only hostnames that are okay to
use are localhost , 127.0.0.1 or a blank (nothing at all):

file://localhost/path/to/file
file://127.0.0.1/path/to/file
file:///path/to/file

Inserting any other host name in there will make recent versions of curl to return an error.

Pay special attention to the third example above ( file:///path/to/file ). That is three slashes
before the path. That is again an area with common mistakes and where browsers allow users to use the
wrong syntax so as a special exception, curl on Windows also allows this incorrect format:

file://X:/path/to/file

… where X is a windows-style drive letter.

Without scheme
As a convenience, curl also allows users to leave out the scheme part from URLs. Then it guesses which
protocol to use based on the first part of the host name. That guessing is basic, as it just checks if the first
part of the host name matches one of a set of protocols, and assumes you meant to use that protocol. This
heuristic is based on the fact that servers traditionally used to be named like that. The protocols that are
detected this way are FTP, DICT, LDAP, IMAP, SMTP and POP3. Any other host name in a scheme-less
URL will make curl default to HTTP.

For example, this gets a file from an FTP site:

curl ftp.funet.fi/README

While this gets data from an HTTP server:

curl example.com

You can modify the default protocol to something other than HTTP with the --proto-default option.

Supported schemes
curl supports or can be made to support (if built so) the following transfer schemes and protocols:

DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT,
POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP

Name and password

Following the scheme in a URL, there can be a possible user name and password field embedded. The use
of this syntax is usually frowned upon these days since you easily leak this information in scripts or
otherwise. For example, listing the directory of an FTP server using a given name and password:

curl ftp://user:[email protected]/

The presence of user name and password in the URL is completely optional. curl also allows that
information to be provide with normal command-line options, outside of the URL.

If you want a non-ASCII letter or maybe a : or @ as part of the user name and/or password, remember to
"URL-encode" that letter: write it as %HH where HH is the hexadecimal byte value. : is %3a and @ is
%40 .

Host

The host name part of the URL is, of course, simply a name that can be resolved to an numerical IP address,
or the numerical address itself.

curl http://example.com

When specifying a numerical address, use the dotted version for IPv4 addresses:

curl http://127.0.0.1/

…and for IPv6 addresses the numerical version needs to be within square brackets:

curl http://[2a04:4e42::561]/

When a host name is used, the converting of the name to an IP address is typically done using the system's
resolver functions. That normally lets a sysadmin provide local name lookups in the /etc/hosts file (or
equivalent).

International Domain Names (IDN)

curl knows how to deal with IDN names and you just pass them on like you would a normal name:

curl https://räksmörgås.se

Port number

Each protocol has a "default port" that curl will use for it, unless a specified port number is given. The
optional port number can be provided within the URL after the host name part, as a colon and the port
number written in decimal. For example, asking for an HTTP document on port 8080:

curl http://example.com:8080/

With the name specified as an IPv4 address:

curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/

With the name given as an IPv6 address:

curl http://[fdea::1]:8080/

The port number is an unsigned 16 bit number, so it has to be within the range 0 to 65535.

TCP vs UDP
The given port number is used when setting up the connection to the server specified in the URL. The port is
either a TCP port number or a UDP port number depending on which actual underlying transport protocol
that is used. TCP is the most common one, but TFTP and HTTP/3 use UDP.

URLs using the file:// scheme cannot have a port number.

Path

Every URL contains a path. If there is none given, / is implied. For example when you use just the host
name like in:

curl https://example.com

The path is sent to the specified server to identify exactly which resource that is requested or that will be
provided.
The exact use of the path is protocol dependent. For example, getting the file README from the default
anonymous user from an FTP server:

curl ftp://ftp.example.com/README

For the protocols that have a directory concept, ending the URL with a trailing slash means that it is a
directory and not a file. Thus asking for a directory list from an FTP server is implied with such a slash:

curl ftp://ftp.example.com/tmp/

If you want a non-ASCII letter or maybe even space ( ) as part of the path field, remember to "URL-encode"
that letter: write it as %HH where HH is the hexadecimal byte value. is %20 .

FTP type

This is not a feature that is widely used.

URLs that identify files on FTP servers have a special feature that allows you to also tell the client (curl in
this case) which file type the resource is. This is because FTP is a little special and can change mode for a
transfer and thus handle the file differently than if it would use another mode.

You tell curl that the FTP resource is an ASCII type by appending ;type=A to the URL. Getting the foo
file from the root directory of example.com using ASCII could then be made with:

curl "ftp://example.com/foo;type=A"

And while curl defaults to binary transfers for FTP, the URL format allows you to also specify the binary type
with type=I:

curl "ftp://example.com/foo;type=I"

Finally, you can tell curl that the identified resource is a directory if the type you pass is D:

curl "ftp://example.com/foo;type=D"

…this can then work as an alternative format, instead of ending the path with a trailing slash as mentioned
above.

Fragment

URLs offer a fragment part. That is usually seen as a hash symbol (#) and a name for a specific name within
a web page in browsers An example of such a URL might look like:

https://www.example.com/info.html#the-plot

curl supports fragments fine when a URL is passed to it, but the fragment part is never actually sent over the
wire so it does not make a difference to curl's operations whether it is present or not.

If you want to make the # character as part of the path and not separating the fragment, make sure to pass it
URL-encoded, as %23 :

curl https://www.example.com/info.html%23the-plot

The "fragment trick"

The fact that the fragment part is not actually used over the network can be taken advantage of when you
craft command lines.

For example, if you want to request the same URL from a server 10 times, you can make a loop and put the
loop instruction in the fragment part. Like this:

curl https://example.com/#[1-10]

Browsers' address bar

It is important to realize that when you use a modern web browser, the address bar they tend to feature at the
top of their main windows are not using URLs or even URIs. They are in fact mostly using IRIs, which is a
superset of URIs to allow internationalization like non-Latin symbols and more, but it usually goes beyond
that, too, as they tend to, for example, handle spaces and do magic things on percent encoding in ways
none of these mentioned specifications say a client should do.

The address bar is quite simply an interface for humans to enter and see URI-like strings.

Sometimes the differences between what you see in a browser's address bar and what you can pass in to
curl is significant.

Many options and URLs

As mentioned above, curl supports hundreds of command-line options and it also supports an unlimited
number of URLs. If your shell or command-line system supports it, there is really no limit to how long a
command line you can pass to curl.

curl will parse the entire command line first, apply the wishes from the command-line options used, and then
go over the URLs one by one (in a left to right order) to perform the operations
For some options (for example -o or -O that tell curl where to store the transfer), you may want to specify
one option for each URL on the command line.

curl will return an exit code for its operation on the last URL used. If you instead rather want curl to exit with
an error on the first URL in the set that fails, use the --fail-early option.

One output for each given URL

If you use a command-line with two URLs, you must tell curl how to handle both of them. The -o and -O
options instruct curl how to save the output for one URL of the URLs, so you might want to have as many of
those options as you have URLs on the command line.

If you have more URLs than output options on the command line, the URL content without corresponding
output instructions will then instead be sent to stdout.

Using the --remote-name-all flag will automatically make curl act as if -O was used for all given
URLs that do not have any output option.

Separate options per URL

In previous sections we described how curl always parses all options in the whole command line and
applies those to all the URLs that it transfers.

That was a simplification: curl also offers an option ( -: , --next ) that inserts a boundary between a set of
options and URLs for which it will apply the options. When the command-line parser finds a --next
option, it applies the following options to the next set of URLs. The --next option thus works as a divider
between a set of options and URLs. You can use as many --next options as you please.

As an example, we do an HTTP GET to a URL and follow redirects, we then make a second HTTP POST to
a different URL and we round it up with a HEAD request to a third URL. All in a single command line:

curl --location http://example.com/1 --next

--data sendthis http://example.com/2 --next
--head http://example.com/3

Trying something like that without the --next options on the command line would generate an illegal
command line since curl would attempt to combine both a POST and a HEAD:

Warning: You can only select one HTTP request method! You asked for both
Warning: POST (-d, --data) and HEAD (-I, --head).
Connection reuse
Setting up a TCP connection and especially a TLS connection can be a slow process, even on high
bandwidth networks.

It can be useful to remember that curl has a connection pool internally which keeps previously used
connections alive and around for a while after they were used so that subsequent requests to the same
hosts can reuse an already established connection.

Of course, they can only be kept alive for as long as the curl tool is running. It is a good reason for trying to
get several transfers done within the same command line instead of running several independent curl
command line invocations.

Parallel transfers

The default behavior of getting the specified URLs one by one in a serial fashion makes it easy to
understand exactly when each URL is fetched but it can be slow.

curl offers the -Z (or --parallel ) option that instead instructs curl to attempt to do the specified
transfers in a parallel fashion. When this is enabled, curl will do a lot of transfers simultaneously instead of
serially. It will do up to 50 transfers at the same time by default and as soon as one of them has completed,
the next one will be kicked off.

For cases where you want to download many files from different sources and a few of them might be slow, a
few fast, this can speed things up tremendously.

If 50 parallel transfer is wrong for you, the --parallel-max option is there to allow you to change that
amount.

Parallel transfer progress meter

Naturally, the ordinary progress meter display that shows file transfer progress for a single transfer is not that
useful for parallel transfers so when curl performs parallel transfers, it will show a different progress meter
that displays information about all the current ongoing transfers in a single line.

Connection before multiplex

When curl is asked to do parallel transfers, it prioritizes to have the additional transfer reuse and multiplex
over other already existing connections. This can potentially lower the total amount of connections (and
thereby resources) necessary but it might be slightly slower at start-up.

With --parallel-immediate , curl is instructed to reverse the prioritization and instead prefer creating
a new connection immediately rather than risk waiting a little to see if the transfer can be multiplexed of
another connection.
URL globbing

At times you want to get a range of URLs that are mostly the same, with only a small portion of it changing
between the requests. Maybe it is a numeric range or maybe a set of names. curl offers "globbing" as a way
to specify many URLs like that easily.

The globbing uses the reserved symbols [] and {} for this, symbols that normally cannot be part of a legal
URL (except for numerical IPv6 addresses but curl handles them fine anyway). If the globbing gets in your
way, disable it with -g, --globoff .

When using [] or {} sequences when invoked from a command line prompt, you probably have to put the full
URL within double quotes to avoid the shell from interfering with it. This also goes for other characters
treated special, like for example '&', '?' and '*'.

While most transfer related functionality in curl is provided by the libcurl library, the URL globbing feature is
not!

Numerical ranges
You can ask for a numerical range with [N-M] syntax, where N is the start index and it goes up to and
including M. For example, you can ask for 100 images one by one that are named numerically:

curl -O "http://example.com/[1-100].png"

and it can even do the ranges with zero prefixes, like if the number is three digits all the time:

curl -O "http://example.com/[001-100].png"

Or maybe you only want even-numbered images so you tell curl a step counter too. This example range
goes from 0 to 100 with an increment of 2:

curl -O "http://example.com/[0-100:2].png"

Alphabetical ranges
curl can also do alphabetical ranges, like when a site has sections named a to z:

curl -O "http://example.com/section[a-z].html"
List
Sometimes the parts do not follow such an easy pattern, and then you can instead give the full list yourself
but then within the curly braces instead of the brackets used for the ranges:

curl -O "http://example.com/{one,two,three,alpha,beta}.html"

Combinations
You can use several globs in the same URL which then will make curl iterate over those, too. To download
the images of Ben, Alice and Frank, in both the resolutions 100 x 100 and 1000 x 1000, a command line
could look like:

curl -O "http://example.com/{Ben,Alice,Frank}-{100x100,1000x1000}.jpg"

Or download all the images of a chess board, indexed by two coordinates ranged 0 to 7:

curl -O "http://example.com/chess-[0-7]x[0-7].jpg"

And you can, of course, mix ranges and series. Get a week's worth of logs for both the web server and the
mail server:

curl -O "http://example.com/{web,mail}-log[0-6].txt"

Output variables for globbing

In all the globbing examples previously in this chapter we have selected to use the -O / --remote-
name option, which makes curl save the target file using the file name part of the used URL.

Sometimes that is not enough. You are downloading multiple files and maybe you want to save them in a
different subdirectory or create the saved file names differently. curl, of course, has a solution for these
situations as well: output file name variables.

Each "glob" used in a URL gets a separate variable. They are referenced as #[num] - that means the
single character # followed by the glob number which starts with 1 for the first glob and ends with the last
glob.

Save the main pages of two different sites:

curl "http://{one,two}.example.com" -o "file_#1.txt"

Save the outputs from a command line with two globs in a subdirectory:

curl "http://{site,host}.host[1-5].example.com" -o "subdir/#1_#2"

Using []{} in URLs

When the globbing concept was introduced in curl in the 1990s, we all used the same Internet standard for
how the URL syntax was defined, and in this standard these four symbols are documented as reserved. You
should URL-encode them in the URL if you wanted to use them ( %HH style). Those symbols were therefore
not used in URLs and were downright attractive to use for globbing purposes.

Later on, the URL syntax has gradually been relaxed and changed and these days every now and then we
see URLs used where one of the four symbols []{} are used as-is, as in not encoded. Passing such a
URL to curl causes it to spew out syntax errors when the glob parser goes crazy.

To work around that problem, you have two separate options. You either encode the symbols yourself, or
you switch off globbing.

Encode the symbols like this:

symbol encoding

[ %5b

] %5d

{ %7b

} %7d

Or switch off globbing with -g or --globoff .

List options

curl has more than two hundred command-line options and the number of options keep increasing over time.
Chances are the number of options will reach 250 within a few years.

To find out which options you need to perform as certain action, you can get curl to list them. First, curl --
help or simply curl -h will get you a list of the most important and frequently used options. You can
then provide an additional "category" to -h to get more options listed for that specific area. Use curl -h
category to list all existing categories or curl -h all to list all available options.

Before curl 7.73.0, the help category system did not exist and then curl --help or simply curl -h
would simply list all existing options in alphabetical order with a brief explanation next to each.
The curl --manual option outputs the entire man page for curl. That is a thorough and complete
document on how each option works amassing several thousand lines of documentation. To wade through
that is also a tedious work and we encourage use of a search function through those text masses. Some
people will appreciate the man page in its web version.

Config file

You can easily end up with curl command lines that use a large number of command-line options, making
them rather hard to work with. Sometimes the length of the command line you want to enter even hits the
maximum length your command-line system allows. The Microsoft Windows command prompt being an
example of something that has a fairly small maximum line length.

To aid such situations, curl offers a feature we call "config file". It allows you to write command-line options
in a text file instead and then tell curl to read options from that file in addition to the command line.

You tell curl to read more command-line options from a specific file with the -K/--config option, like this:

curl -K cmdline.txt http://example.com

…and in the cmdline.txt file (which, of course, can use any file name you please) you enter each
command line per line:

# this is a comment, we ask to follow redirects

--location
# ask to do a HEAD request
--head

The config file accepts both short and long options, exactly as you would write them on a command line. As
a special extra feature, it also allows you to write the long format of the options without the leading two
dashes to make it easier to read. Using that style, the config file shown above can alternatively be written as:

# this is a comment, we ask to follow redirects

location
# ask to do a HEAD request
head

Command line options that take an argument must have its argument provided on the same line as the
option. For example changing the User-Agent HTTP header can be done with

user-agent "Everything-is-an-agent"

To allow the config files to look even more like a true config file, it also allows you to use '=' or ':' between the
option and its argument. As you see above it is not necessary, but some like the clarity it offers. Setting the
user-agent option again:
 user-agent = "Everything-is-an-agent"

If the parameter contains whitespace (or starts with : or =), the parameter must be enclosed within quotes.
Within double quotes, the following escape sequences are available: \\, \", \t, \n, \r and \v. A backslash
preceding any other letter is ignored.

The argument to an option can be specified without double quotes and then curl will treat the next space or
newline as the end of the argument.

The user agent string example we have used above has no white spaces and therefore it can also be
provided without the quotes like:

user-agent = Everything-is-an-agent

Finally, if you want to provide a URL in a config file, you must do that the --url way, or just with url , and
not like on the command line where everything that is not an option is assumed to be a URL. So you provide
a URL for curl like this:

url = "http://example.com"

Default config file

When curl is invoked, it always (unless -q is used) checks for a default config file and uses it if found.

The default config file is checked for in the following places in this order:

1. $CURL_HOME/.curlrc

2. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/.curlrc (Added in 7.73.0)

3. $HOME/.curlrc

4. Windows: %USERPROFILE%\\.curlrc

5. Windows: %APPDATA%\\.curlrc

6. Windows: %USERPROFILE%\\Application Data\\.curlrc

7. Non-Windows: use getpwuid to find the home directory

8. On Windows, if it finds no .curlrc file in the sequence described above, it checks for one in the
same dir the curl executable is placed.

On Windows two filenames are checked per location: .curlrc and _curlrc , preferring the former.
Ancient curl versions on Windows checked for _curlrc only.

Passwords
Passwords are tricky and sensitive. Leaking a password can make someone other than you access the
resources and the data otherwise protected.

curl offers several ways to receive passwords from the user and then subsequently pass them on or use
them to something else.

The most basic curl authentication option is -u / --user . It accepts an argument that is the user name
and password, colon separated. Like when alice wants to request a page requiring HTTP authentication
and her password is 12345 :

$ curl -u alice:12345 http://example.com/

Command line leakage

Several potentially bad things are going on here. First, we are entering a password on the command line
and the command line might be readable for other users on the same system (assuming you have a multi-
user system). curl will help minimize that risk by trying to blank out passwords from process listings.

One way to avoid passing the user name and password on the command line is to instead use a .netrc file or
a config file. You can also use the -u option without specifying the password, and then curl will instead
prompt the user for it when it runs.

Network leakage
Secondly, this command line sends the user credentials to an HTTP server, which is a clear-text protocol
that is open for man-in-the-middle or other snoopers to spy on the connection and see what is sent. In this
command line example, it makes curl use HTTP Basic authentication and that is completely insecure.

There are several ways to avoid this, and the key is, of course, then to avoid protocols or authentication
schemes that sends credentials in plain text over the network. Easiest is perhaps to make sure you use
encrypted versions of protocols. Use HTTPS instead of HTTP, use FTPS instead of FTP and so on.

If you need to stick to a plain text and insecure protocol, then see if you can switch to using an authentication
method that avoids sending the credentials in the clear. If you want HTTP, such methods would include
Digest ( --digest ), Negotiate ( --negotiate. ) and NTLM ( --ntlm ).

Progress meter

curl has a built-in progress meter. When curl is invoked to transfer data (either uploading or downloading) it
can show that meter in the terminal screen to show how the transfer is progressing, namely the current
transfer speed, how long it has been going on and how long it thinks it might be left until completion.
The progress meter is inhibited if curl deems that there is output going to the terminal, as the progress meter
would interfere with that output and just mess up what gets displayed. A user can also forcibly switch off the
progress meter with the -s / --silent option, which tells curl to hush.
If you invoke curl and do not get the progress meter, make sure your output is directed somewhere other
than the terminal.

curl also features an alternative and simpler progress meter that you enable with -# / --progress-
bar . As the long name implies, it instead shows the transfer as progress bar.

At times when curl is asked to transfer data, it cannot figure out the total size of the requested operation and
that then subsequently makes the progress meter contain fewer details and it cannot, for example, make
forecasts for transfer times, etc.

Units
The progress meter displays bytes and bytes per second.

It will also use suffixes for larger amounts of bytes, using the 1024 base system so 1024 is one kilobyte (1K),
2048 is 2K, etc. curl supports these:

Suffix Amount Name

K 2^10 kilobyte

M 2^20 megabyte

G 2^30 gigabyte

T 2^40 terabyte

P 2^50 petabyte

The times are displayed using H:MM:SS for hours, minutes and seconds.

Progress meter legend

The progress meter exists to show a user that something actually is happening. The different fields in the
output have the following meaning:

% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Curr.

Dload Upload Total Current Left Speed
0 151M 0 38608 0 0 9406 0 4:41:43 0:00:04 4:41:39 9287

From left to right:

 Title Meaning

% Percentage completed of the whole transfer

Total Total size of the whole expected transfer (if known

% Percentage completed of the download

Received Currently downloaded number of bytes

% Percentage completed of the upload

Xferd Currently uploaded number of bytes

Average transfer speed of the entire download so

Average Speed Dload
far, in number of bytes per second

Average transfer speed of the entire upload so far

Average Speed Upload
in number of bytes per second

Expected time to complete the operation, in

Time Total HH:MM:SS notation for hours, minutes and
seconds

Time passed since the start of the transfer, in

Time Current HH:MM:SS notation for hours, minutes and
seconds

Expected time left to completion, in HH:MM:SS

Time Left
notation for hours, minutes and seconds

Average transfer speed over the last 5 seconds (th

Curr. Speed first 5 seconds of a transfer is based on less time,
course) in number of bytes per second

Using curl

Previous chapters have described some basic details on what curl is and something about the basic
command lines. You use command-line options and you pass on URLs to work with.

In this chapter, we are going to dive deeper into a variety of different concepts of what the curl tool can do
and how to tell curl to use these features. You should consider all these features as different tools that are
here to help you do your file transfer tasks as conveniently as possible.

Verbose
If your curl command does not execute or return what you expected it to, your first gut reaction should always
be to run the command with the -v / --verbose option to get more information.

When verbose mode is enabled, curl gets more talkative and will explain and show a lot more of its doings.
It will add informational tests and prefix them with '*'. For example, let's see what curl might say when trying
a simple HTTP example (saving the downloaded data in the file called 'saved'):

$ curl -v http://example.com -o saved

* Rebuilt URL to: http://example.com/

Ok so we invoked curl with a URL that it considers incomplete so it helps us and it adds a trailing slash
before it moves on.

* Trying 93.184.216.34...

This tells us curl now tries to connect to this IP address. It means the name 'example.com' has been
resolved to one or more addresses and this is the first (and possibly only) address curl will try to connect to.

* Connected to example.com (93.184.216.34) port 80 (#0)

It worked! curl connected to the site and here it explains how the name maps to the IP address and on which
port it has connected to. The '(#0)' part is which internal number curl has given this connection. If you try
multiple URLs in the same command line you can see it use more connections or reuse connections, so the
connection counter may increase or not increase depending on what curl decides it needs to do.

If we use an HTTPS:// URL instead of an HTTP one, there will also be a whole bunch of lines explaining
how curl uses CA certs to verify the server's certificate and some details from the server's certificate, etc.
Including which ciphers were selected and more TLS details.

In addition to the added information given from curl internals, the -v verbose mode will also make curl show
all headers it sends and receives. For protocols without headers (like FTP, SMTP, POP3 and so on), we can
consider commands and responses as headers and they will thus also be shown with -v.

If we then continue the output seen from the command above (but ignore the actual HTML response), curl
will show:

> GET / HTTP/1.1

> Host: example.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.45.0

> Accept: */*

>

This is the full HTTP request to the site. This request is how it looks in a default curl 7.45.0 installation and it
may, of course, differ slightly between different releases and in particular it will change if you add command
line options.

The last line of the HTTP request headers looks empty, and it is. It signals the separation between the
headers and the body and in this request there is no "body" to send
Moving on and assuming everything goes according to plan, the sent request will get a corresponding
response from the server and that HTTP response will start with a set of headers before the response body:

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK

< Accept-Ranges: bytes
< Cache-Control: max-age=604800
< Content-Type: text/html
< Date: Sat, 19 Dec 2015 22:01:03 GMT
< Etag: "359670651"
< Expires: Sat, 26 Dec 2015 22:01:03 GMT
< Last-Modified: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 23:54:35 GMT
< Server: ECS (ewr/15BD)
< Vary: Accept-Encoding
< X-Cache: HIT
< x-ec-custom-error: 1
< Content-Length: 1270
<

This may look mostly like mumbo jumbo to you, but this is normal set of HTTP headers—metadata—about
the response. The first line's "200" might be the most important piece of information in there and means
"everything is fine".

The last line of the received headers is, as you can see, empty, and that is the marker used for the HTTP
protocol to signal the end of the headers.

After the headers comes the actual response body, the data payload. The regular -v verbose mode does not
show that data but only displays

{ [1270 bytes data]

That 1270 bytes should then be in the 'saved' file. You can also see that there was a header named Content-
Length: in the response that contained the exact file length (it will not always be present in responses).

HTTP/2 and HTTP/3

When doing file transfers using version two or three of the HTTP protocol, curl sends and receives
compressed headers. So to display outgoing and incoming HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 headers in a readable
and understandable way, curl will actually show the uncompressed versions in a style similar to how they
appear with HTTP/1.1.

Silence
The opposite of verbose is, of course, to make curl more silent. With the -s (or --silent ) option you
make curl switch off the progress meter and not output any error messages for when errors occur. It gets
mute. It will still output the downloaded data you ask it to.
With silence activated, you can ask for it to still output the error message on failures by adding -S or --
show-error .

Trace options

There are times when -v is not enough. In particular, when you want to store the complete stream
including the actual transferred data.

For situations when curl does encrypted file transfers with protocols such as HTTPS, FTPS or SFTP, other
network monitoring tools (like Wireshark or tcpdump) will not be able to do this job as easily for you.

For this, curl offers two other options that you use instead of -v .

--trace [filename] will save a full trace in the given file name. You can also use '-' (a single minus)
instead of a file name to get it passed to stdout. You would use it like this:

$ curl --trace dump http://example.com

When completed, there is a 'dump' file that can turn out pretty sizable. In this case, the 15 first lines of the
dump file looks like:

== Info: Rebuilt URL to: http://example.com/

== Info: Trying 93.184.216.34...
== Info: Connected to example.com (93.184.216.34) port 80 (#0)
=> Send header, 75 bytes (0x4b)
0000: 47 45 54 20 2f 20 48 54 54 50 2f 31 2e 31 0d 0a GET / HTTP/1.1..
0010: 48 6f 73 74 3a 20 65 78 61 6d 70 6c 65 2e 63 6f Host: example.co
0020: 6d 0d 0a 55 73 65 72 2d 41 67 65 6e 74 3a 20 63 m..User-Agent: c
0030: 75 72 6c 2f 37 2e 34 35 2e 30 0d 0a 41 63 63 65 url/7.45.0..Acce
0040: 70 74 3a 20 2a 2f 2a 0d 0a 0d 0a pt: */*....

<= Recv header, 17 bytes (0x11)

0000: 48 54 54 50 2f 31 2e 31 20 32 30 30 20 4f 4b 0d HTTP/1.1 200 OK.
0010: 0a .
<= Recv header, 22 bytes (0x16)
0000: 41 63 63 65 70 74 2d 52 61 6e 67 65 73 3a 20 62 Accept-Ranges: b
0010: 79 74 65 73 0d 0a ytes..

Every single sent and received byte get displayed individually in hexadecimal numbers. Received headers
will be output line by line.

If you think the hexadecimals are not helping, you can try --trace-ascii [filename] instead, also
this accepting '-' for stdout and that makes the 15 first lines of tracing look like:

== Info: Rebuilt URL to: http://example.com/

 ==
== Info: Trying 93.184.216.34...
Info: Connected to example.com (93.184.216.34) port 80 (#0)
=> Send header, 75 bytes (0x4b)
0000: GET / HTTP/1.1
0010: Host: example.com
0023: User-Agent: curl/7.45.0
003c: Accept: */*
0049:
<= Recv header, 17 bytes (0x11)
0000: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
<= Recv header, 22 bytes (0x16)
0000: Accept-Ranges: bytes
<= Recv header, 31 bytes (0x1f)
0000: Cache-Control: max-age=604800

--trace-time
This options prefixes all verbose/trace outputs with a high resolution timer for when the line is printed. It
works with the regular -v / --verbose option as well as with --trace and --trace-ascii .

An example could look like this:

$ curl -v --trace-time http://example.com

23:38:56.837164 * Rebuilt URL to: http://example.com/
23:38:56.841456 * Trying 93.184.216.34...
23:38:56.935155 * Connected to example.com (93.184.216.34) port 80 (#0)
23:38:56.935296 > GET / HTTP/1.1
23:38:56.935296 > Host: example.com
23:38:56.935296 > User-Agent: curl/7.45.0
23:38:56.935296 > Accept: */*
23:38:56.935296 >
23:38:57.029570 < HTTP/1.1 200 OK
23:38:57.029699 < Accept-Ranges: bytes
23:38:57.029803 < Cache-Control: max-age=604800
23:38:57.029903 < Content-Type: text/html
---- snip ----

The lines are all the local time as hours:minutes:seconds and then number of microseconds in that second.

Write out

--write-out or just -w for short, outputs text and information after a transfer is completed. It offers a
large range of variables that you can include in the output, variables that have been set with values and
information from the transfer.

Instruct curl to output a string by passing plain text to this option:

 curl -w "formatted string" http://example.com/

…and you can also have curl read that string from a given file instead if you prefix the string with '@':

curl -w @filename http://example.com/

…or even have curl read the string from stdin if you use '-' as filename:

curl -w @- http://example.com/

The variables that are available are accessed by writing %{variable_name} in the string and that
variable will then be substituted by the correct value. To output a normal '%' you just write it as '%%'. You can
also output a newline by using '\n', a carriage return with '\r' and a tab space with '\t'.

(The %-symbol is special on the Windows command line, where all occurrences of % must be doubled
when using this option.)

As an example, we can output the Content-Type and the response code from an HTTP transfer, separated
with newlines and some extra text like this:

curl -w "Type: %{content_type}\nCode: %{response_code}\n" http://example.com

This feature writes the output to stdout so you probably want to make sure that you do not also send the
downloaded content to stdout as then you might have a hard time to separate out the data.

Available --write-out variables

Some of these variables are not available in really old curl versions.

Variable Description

Content-Type of the requested document, if there

content_type was any.

Error message from the transfer. Empty if no error

errormsg occurred. (Introduced in 7.75.0)

Numerical exit code from the transfer. 0 if no error

exitcode occurred. (Introduced in 7.75.0)

The ultimate filename that curl writes out to.

Practical if curl is told to write to a file with the --
filename_effective remote-name or --output option. It's most
 useful in combination with the --remote-
header-name option.
The initial path curl ended up in when logging on
ftp_entry_path the remote FTP server.

The former variable name for what is now known

http_code as response_code .

the numerical code that was found in the last

http_connect response (from a proxy) to a curl CONNECT
request.

http_version The HTTP version that was used.

json all write-out variables as a single JSON object.

IP address of the local end of the most recently

local_ip used connection - can be either IPv4 or IPv6

Local port number of the most recently used

local_port connection

method HTTP method the most recent request used

Number of new connects made in the recent

num_connects transfer.

num_headers Number of response headers in the last response

Number of redirects that were followed in the

num_redirects request.

If the transfer ended with an error, show the rest of

onerror the string, otherwise stop here. (Introduced in
7.75.0)

The result of the SSL peer certificate verification

proxy_ssl_verify_result that was requested when communicating with a
proxy. 0 means the verification was successful.

The actual URL a redirect would take you to when

redirect_url an HTTP request was made without -L to follow
redirects.

The remote IP address of the most recently used

remote_ip connection — can be either IPv4 or IPv6.
remote_port The remote port number of the most recently made
connection.
The numerical response code that was found in th
response_code last transfer.

scheme scheme used in the previous URL

size_download Total number of bytes that were downloaded.

size_header Total number of bytes of the downloaded headers

Total number of bytes that were sent in the HTTP

size_request request.

size_upload Total number of bytes that were uploaded.

Average download speed that curl measured for

speed_download the complete download in bytes per second.

Average upload speed that curl measured for the

speed_upload complete upload in bytes per second.

the result of the SSL peer certificate verification th

ssl_verify_result was requested. 0 means the verification was
successful.

stderr Makes the rest of the output get written to stderr.

stdout makes the rest of the output get written to stdout.

The time in seconds, it took from the start until the

SSL/SSH/etc connect/handshake to the remote
time_appconnect host was completed.

The time in seconds, it took from the start until the

time_connect TCP connect to the remote host (or proxy) was
completed.

The time in seconds, it took from the start until the

time_namelookup name resolving was completed.

The time in seconds, it took from the start until the

file transfer was just about to begin. This includes
time_pretransfer all pre-transfer commands and negotiations that a
specific to the particular protocol(s) involved.

The time in seconds, it took for all redirection step

including name lookup, connect, pre-transfer and
 time_redirect transfer before the final transaction was started.
time_redirect the complete execution time for
multiple redirections.
The time in seconds, it took from the start until the
first byte was just about to be transferred. This
time_starttransfer includes time_pretransfer and also the time the
server needed to calculate the result.

The total time in seconds, that the full operation

time_total lasted. The time will be displayed with millisecond
resolution.

url The URL used in the transfer. (Introduced in 7.75.0

The URL that was fetched last. This is particularly

url_effective meaningful if you have told curl to follow Location
headers (with -L ).

0-based numerical index of the URL used in the

urlnum transfer. (Introduced in 7.75.0)

Version

To get to know what version of curl you have installed, run

curl --version

or use the shorthand version:

curl -V

The output from that command line is typically four lines, out of which some will be rather long and might
wrap in your terminal window.

An example output from a Debian Linux in June 2020:

curl 7.68.0 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.68.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1g zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libid

Release-Date: 2020-01-08
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher http https imap imaps ldap ldaps pop3 pop3s rtmp rtsp scp
Features: AsynchDNS brotli GSS-API HTTP2 HTTPS-proxy IDN IPv6 Kerberos Largefile libz NTLM NTL

while the same command line invoked on a Windows 10 machine on the same date looks like:
 curl 7.55.1 (Windows)
Release-Date: libcurl/7.55.1 WinSSL
[unreleased]
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps http https imap imaps pop3 pop3s smtp smtps telnet tftp
Features: AsynchDNS IPv6 Largefile SSPI Kerberos SPNEGO NTLM SSL

The meaning of the four lines?

Line 1: curl
The first line starts with curl and first shows the main version number of the tool. Then follows the
"platform" the tool was built for within parentheses and the libcurl version. Those three fields are common for
all curl builds.

If the curl version number has -DEV appended to it, it means the version is built straight from a in-
development source code and it is not an officially released and "blessed" version.

The rest of this line contains names of third party components this build of curl uses, often with their
individual version number next to it with a slash separator. Like OpenSSL/1.1.1g and
nghttp2/1.41.0 . This can for example tell you which TLS backends this curl uses.

Line 1: TLS versions

Line 1 may contain one or more TLS libraries. curl can be built to support more than one TLS library which
then makes curl - at start-up - select which particular backend to use for this invoke.

If curl supports more than one TLS library like this, the ones that are not selected by default will be listed
within parentheses. Thus, if you do not specify which backend to use use (with the CURL_SSL_BACKEND
environment variable) the one listed without parentheses will be used.

Line 2: Release-Date
This line shows the date this curl version was released by the curl project, and it can also show a secondary
"Patch date" if it has been updated somehow after it was originally released.

This says [unreleased] if curl was built another way than from a release tarball, and as you can see
above that is how Microsoft did it for Windows 10 and the curl project does not recommend it.

Line 3: Protocols
This is a list of all transfer protocols (URL schemes really) in alphabetical order that this curl build supports.
All names are shown in lowercase letters.

This list can contain these protocols:

dict, file, ftp, ftps, gopher, http, https, imap, imaps, ldap, ldaps, mqtt, pop3, pop3s, rtmp, rtsp, scp, sftp, smb,
smbs, smtp, smtps, telnet and tftp

Line 4: Features
The list of features this build of curl supports. If the name is present in the list, that feature is enabled. If the
name is not present, that feature is not enabled.

Features that can be present there:

alt-svc - Support for the alt-svc: header

AsynchDNS - This curl uses asynchronous name resolves. Asynchronous name resolves can be done
using either the c-ares or the threaded resolver backends.
brotli - support for automatic brotli compression over HTTP(S)

CharConv - curl was built with support for character set conversions (like EBCDIC)
Debug - This curl uses a libcurl built with Debug. This enables more error-tracking and memory
debugging etc. For curl-developers only!

GSS-API - GSS-API authentication is enabled

HTTP2 - HTTP/2 support has been built-in.

HTTP3 - HTTP/3 support has been built-in.
HTTPS-proxy - This curl is built to support HTTPS proxy.
IDN - This curl supports IDN - international domain names.

IPv6 - You can use IPv6 with this.

krb4 - Krb4 for FTP is supported
Largefile - This curl supports transfers of large files, files larger than 2GB.
libz - Automatic gzip decompression of compressed files over HTTP is supported.
Metalink - This curl supports Metalink. In modern curl versions this option is never available.

MultiSSL - This curl supports multiple TLS backends. The first line will detail exactly which TLS
libraries.

NTLM - NTLM authentication is supported.

NTLM_WB - NTLM authentication is supported.
PSL - Public Suffix List (PSL) is available and means that this curl has been built with knowledge about
"public suffixes", used for cookies.
SPNEGO - SPNEGO authentication is supported.
SSL - SSL versions of various protocols are supported, such as HTTPS, FTPS, POP3S and so on.
SSPI - SSPI is supported
TLS-SRP - SRP (Secure Remote Password) authentication is supported for TLS.
UnixSockets - Unix sockets support is provided.
Persistent connections

When setting up connections to sites, curl keeps old connections around for a while so that if the next
transfer is done using the same host as a previous transfer, it can reuse the same connection again and thus
save a lot of time. We call this persistent connections. curl will always try to keep connections alive and
reuse existing connections as far as it can.

Connections are kept in the connection pool, sometimes also called the connection cache.

The curl command-line tool can, however, only keep connections alive for as long as it runs, so as soon as it
exits back to your command line it has to close down all currently open connections (and also free and clean
up all the other caches it uses to decrease time of subsequent operations). We call the pool of alive
connections the "connection cache".

If you want to perform N transfers or operations against the same host or same base URL, you could gain a
lot of speed by trying to do them in as few curl command lines as possible instead of repeatedly invoking
curl with one URL at a time.

Downloads

"Download" means getting data from a server on a network, and the server is then clearly considered to be
"above" you. This is loading data down from the server onto your machine where you are running curl.

Downloading is probably the most common use case for curl — retrieving the specific data pointed to by a
URL onto your machine.

What exactly is downloading?

Storing downloads
Download to a file named by the URL

Use the target file name from the server

HTML and charsets
Compression
Shell redirects
Multiple downloads
My browser shows something else

Maximum file size

Storing metadata in file system
Raw

Retry
Resuming and ranges
What exactly is downloading?

You specify the resource to download by giving curl a URL. curl defaults to downloading a URL unless told
otherwise, and the URL identifies what to download. In this example the URL to download is
http://example.com :

curl http://example.com

The URL is broken down into its individual components (as explained elsewhere), the correct server is
contacted and is then asked to deliver the specific resource—often a file. The server then delivers the data,
or it refuses or perhaps the client asked for the wrong data and then that data is delivered.

A request for a resource is protocol-specific so an FTP:// URL works differently than an HTTP:// URL
or an SFTP:// URL.

A URL without a path part, that is a URL that has a host name part only (like the http://example.com
example above) will get a slash ('/') appended to it internally and then that is the resource curl will ask for
from the server.

If you specify multiple URLs on the command line, curl will download each URL one by one. It will not start
the second transfer until the first one is complete, etc.

Storing downloads

If you try the example download as in the previous section, you will notice that curl will output the
downloaded data to stdout unless told to do something else. Outputting data to stdout is really useful when
you want to pipe it into another program or similar, but it is not always the optimal way to deal with your
downloads.

Give curl a specific file name to save the download in with -o [filename] (with --output as the long
version of the option), where filename is either just a file name, a relative path to a file name or a full path to
the file.

Also note that you can put the -o before or after the URL; it makes no difference:

curl -o output.html http://example.com/

curl -o /tmp/index.html http://example.com/
curl http://example.com -o ../../folder/savethis.html

This is, of course, not limited to http:// URLs but works the same way no matter which type of URL you
download:

curl -o file.txt ftp://example.com/path/to/file-name.ext

If you ask curl to send the output to the terminal, it attempts to detect and prevent binary data from being sent
there since that can seriously mess up your terminal (sometimes to the point where it stops working). You
can override curl's binary-output-prevention and force the output to get sent to stdout by using -o - .

curl has several other ways to store and name the downloaded data. Details follow.

Overwriting
When curl downloads a remote resource into a local file name as described above, it will overwrite that file
in case it already existed. It will clobber it.

curl offers a way to avoid this clobbering: --no-clobber .

When using this option, and curl finds that there already exists a file with the given name, curl instead
appends a period plus a number to the file name in an attempt to find a name that is not already used. It will
start with 1 and then continue trying until it reaches 100 and pick the first available one.

For example, if you ask curl to download a URL to picture.png , and in that directory there already are
two files called picture.png and picture.png.1 , the following will create save the file as
picture.png.2 :

curl --no-clobber https://example.com/image -o picture.png

A user can use the --write-out option's %filename_effective variable to figure out which name that
was eventually used.

Leftovers on errors
By default, if curl runs into a problem during a download and exits with an error, the partially transferred file
will be left as-is. It could be a small fraction of the intended file, or it could be almost the entire thing. It is up
to the user to decide what to do with the leftovers.

The --remove-on-error command line option changes this behavior. It tells curl to delete any partially
saved file if curl exits with an error. No more leftovers!

Download to a file named by the URL

Many URLs, however, already contain the file name part in the rightmost end. curl lets you use that as a
shortcut so you do not have to repeat it with -o . So instead of:

curl -o file.html http://example.com/file.html

You can save the remove URL resource into the local file 'file html' with this:

curl -O http://example.com/file.html

This is the -O (uppercase letter o) option, or --remote-name for the long name version. The -O option
selects the local file name to use by picking the file name part of the URL that you provide. This is important.
You specify the URL and curl picks the name from this data. If the site redirects curl further (and if you tell
curl to follow redirects), it does not change the file name curl will use for storing this.

Use the URL's file name part for all URLs

As a reaction to adding a hundred -O options when using a hundred URLs, we introduced an option called
--remote-name-all . This makes -O the default operation for all given URLs. You can still provide
individual "storage instructions" for URLs but if you leave one out for a URL that gets downloaded, the
default action is then switched from stdout to -O style.

Use the target file name from the server

HTTP servers have the option to provide a header named Content-Disposition: in responses. That
header may contain a suggested file name for the contents delivered, and curl can be told to use that hint to
name its local file. The -J / --remote-header-name enables this. If you also use the -O option, it
makes curl use the file name from the URL by default and only if there is actually a valid Content-Disposition
header available, it switches to saving using that name.

-J has some problems and risks associated with it that users need to be aware of:

1. It will only use the rightmost part of the suggested file name, so any path or directories the server
suggests will be stripped out.

2. Since the file name is entirely selected by the server, curl will, of course, overwrite any preexisting local
file in your current directory if the server happens to provide such a file name.
3. File name encoding and character sets issues. curl does not decode the name in any way, so you may
end up with a URL-encoded file name where a browser would otherwise decode it to something more
readable using a sensible character set.

HTML and charsets

curl will download the exact binary data that the server sends. This might be of importance to you in case, for
example, you download an HTML page or other text data that uses a certain character encoding that your
browser then displays as expected. curl will then not translate the arriving data.

A common example where this causes some surprising results is when a user downloads a web page with
something like:
 curl https://example.com/ -o storage.html

…and when inspecting the storage.html file after the fact, the user realizes that one or more characters
look funny or downright wrong. This might occur because the server sent the characters using charset X,
while your editor and environment use charset Y. In an ideal world, we would all use UTF-8 everywhere but
unfortunately, that is still not the case.

A common work-around for this issue that works decently is to use the common iconv utility to translate a
text file to and from different charsets.

Compression

curl allows you to ask HTTP and HTTPS servers to provide compressed versions of the data and then
perform automatic decompression of it on arrival. In situations where bandwidth is more limited than CPU
this will help you receive more data in a shorter amount of time.

HTTP compression can be done using two different mechanisms, one which might be considered "The
Right Way" and the other that is the way that everyone actually uses and is the widespread and popular way
to do it. The common way to compress HTTP content is using the Content-Encoding header. You ask curl
to use this with the --compressed option:

curl --compressed http://example.com/

With this option enabled (and if the server supports it) it delivers the data in a compressed way and curl will
decompress it before saving it or sending it to stdout. This usually means that as a user you do not really see
or experience the compression other than possibly noticing a faster transfer.

The --compressed option asks for Content-Encoding compression using one of the supported
compression algorithms. There is also the rare Transfer-Encoding method, which is the request header
that was created for this automated method but was never really widely adopted. You can tell curl to ask for
Transfer-Encoded compression with --tr-encoding :

curl --tr-encoding http://example.com/

In theory, there is nothing that prevents you from using both in the same command line, although in practice,
you may then experience that some servers get a little confused when ask to compress in two different ways.
It is generally safer to just pick one.

Shell redirects

When you invoke curl from a shell or some other command-line prompt system, that environment generally
provides you with a set of output redirection abilities. In most Linux and Unix shells and with Windows'
command prompts, you direct stdout to a file with > filename . Using this, of course, makes the use of -o

curl http://example.com/ > example.html

Redirecting output to a file redirects all output from curl to that file, so even if you ask to transfer more than
one URL to stdout, redirecting the output will get all the URLs' output stored in that single file.

curl http://example.com/1 http://example.com/2 > files

Unix shells usually allow you to redirect the stderr stream separately. The stderr stream is usually a stream
that also gets shown in the terminal, but you can redirect it separately from the stdout stream. The stdout
stream is for the data while stderr is metadata and errors, etc., that are not data. You can redirect stderr with
2>file like this:

curl http://example.com > files.html 2>errors

Multiple downloads

As curl can be told to download many URLs in a single command line, there are, of course, times when you
want to store these downloads in nicely named local files.

The key to understanding this is that each download URL needs its own "storage instruction". Without said
"storage instruction", curl will default to sending the data to stdout. If you ask for two URLs and only tell curl
where to save the first URL, the second one is sent to stdout. Like this:

curl -o one.html http://example.com/1 http://example.com/2

The "storage instructions" are read and handled in the same order as the download URLs so they do not
have to be next to the URL in any way. You can round up all the output options first, last or interleaved with
the URLs. You choose.

These examples all work the same way:

curl -o 1.txt -o 2.txt http://example.com/1 http://example.com/2

curl http://example.com/1 http://example.com/2 -o 1.txt -o 2.txt
curl -o 1.txt http://example.com/1 http://example.com/2 -o 2.txt
curl -o 1.txt http://example.com/1 -o 2.txt http://example.com/2

The -O is similarly just an instruction for a single download so if you download multiple URLs, use more of
them:

curl -O -O http://example.com/1 http://example.com/2

My browser shows something else

A common use case is using curl to get a URL that you can get in your browser when you paste the URL in
the browser's address bar.

A browser getting a URL as input does so much more and in so many different ways than curl that what curl
shows in your terminal output is probably not at all what you see in your browser window.

Client differences

Curl only gets exactly what you ask it to get and it never parses the actual content—the data—that the server
delivers. A browser gets data and it activates different parsers depending on what kind of content it thinks it
gets. For example, if the data is HTML it will parse it to display a web page and possibly download other sub
resources such as images, JavaScript and CSS files. When curl downloads HTML it will just get that single
HTML resource, even if it, when parsed by a browser, would trigger a whole busload of more downloads. If
you want curl to download any sub-resources as well, you need to pass those URLs to curl and ask it to get
those, just like any other URLs.

Clients also differ in how they send their requests, and some aspects of a request for a resource include, for
example, format preferences, asking for compressed data, or just telling the server from which previous page
we are "coming from". curl's requests will differ a little or a lot from how your browser sends its requests.

Server differences
The server that receives the request and delivers data is often setup to act in certain ways depending on
what kind of client it thinks communicates with it. Sometimes it is as innocent as trying to deliver the best
content for the client, sometimes it is to hide some content for some clients or even to try to work around
known problems in specific browsers. Then there is also, of course, various kind of login systems that might
rely on HTTP authentication or cookies or the client being from the pre-validated IP address range.

Sometimes getting the same response from a server using curl as the response you get with a browser ends
up really hard work. Users then typically record their browser sessions with the browser's networking tools
and then compare that recording with recorded data from curl's --trace-ascii option and proceed to
modify curl's requests (often with -H / --header ) until the server starts to respond the same to both.

This type of work can be both time consuming and tedious. You should always do this with permission from
the server owners or admins.

Intermediaries' fiddlings
Intermediaries are proxies, explicit or implicit ones. Some environments will force you to use one or you may
choose to use one for various reasons, but there are also the transparent ones that will intercept your
network traffic silently and proxy it for you no matter what you want
Proxies are "middle men" that terminate the traffic and then act on your behalf to the remote server. This can
introduce all sorts of explicit filtering and "saving" you from certain content or even "protecting" the remote
server from what data you try to send to it, but even more so it introduces another software's view on how the
protocol works and what the right things to do are.

Interfering intermediaries are often the cause of lots of head aches and mysteries down to downright
malicious modifications of content.

We strongly encourage you to use HTTPS or other means to verify that the contents you are downloading or
uploading are really the data that the remote server has sent to you and that your precious bytes end up
verbatim at the intended destination.

Maximum file size

When you want to make sure your curl command line will not try to download a too-large file, you can
instruct curl to stop before doing that, if it knows the size before the transfer starts! Maybe that would use too
much bandwidth, take too long time or you do not have enough space on your hard drive:

curl --max-filesize 100000 https://example.com/

Give curl the largest download you will accept in number of bytes and if curl can figure out the size before
the transfer starts it will abort before trying to download something larger.

There are many situations in which curl cannot figure out the size at the time the transfer starts and this
option will not affect those transfers, even if they may end up larger than the specified amount.

Storing metadata in file system

When saving a download to a file with curl, the --xattr option tells curl to also store certain file metadata
in "extended file attributes". These extended attributes are standardized name/value pairs stored in the file
system, assuming one of the supported file systems and operating systems are used.

Currently, the URL is stored in the xdg.origin.url attribute and, for HTTP, the content type is stored in
the mime_type attribute. If the file system does not support extended attributes when this option is set, a
warning is issued.

Raw

When --raw is used, it disables all internal HTTP decoding of content or transfer encodings and instead
makes curl passed on unaltered, raw, data.
This is typically used if you are writing a middle software and you want to pass on the content to another
HTTP client and allow that to do the decoding instead.

Retry

Normally curl will only make a single attempt to perform a transfer and return an error if not successful. Using
the --retry option you can tell curl to retry certain failed transfers.

If a transient error is returned when curl tries to perform a transfer, it will retry this number of times before
giving up. Setting the number to 0 makes curl do no retries (which is the default). Transient error means
either: a timeout, an FTP 4xx response code or an HTTP 5xx response code.

Tweak your retries

When curl is about to retry a transfer, it will first wait one second and then for all forthcoming retries it will
double the waiting time until it reaches 10 minutes which then will be the delay between the rest of the
retries. Using --retry-delay you can disable this exponential backoff algorithm and set your own delay
between the attempts. With --retry-max-time you cap the total time allowed for retries. The --max-
time option will still specify the longest time a single of these transfers is allowed to spend.

Make curl retry up to 5 times, but no more than two minutes:

curl --retry 5 --retry-max-time 120 https://example.com

Connection refused
The default retry mechanism only retries transfers for what are considered transient errors. Those are errors
that the server itself hints and qualifies as being there right now but that might be gone at a later time.

Sometimes you as a user know more about the situation and you can then help out curl to do better retries.
For starters, you can tell curl to consider "connection refused" to be a transient error. Maybe you know that
the server you communicate with is a flaky one or maybe you know that you sometimes try to download from
it when it reboots or similar. You use --retry-connrefused for this.

For example: retry up to 5 times and consider ECONNREFUSED a reason for retry:

curl --retry 5 --retry-connrefused https://example.com

Retry on any and all errors

The most aggressive form of retry is for the cases where you know that the URL is supposed to work and
you will not tolerate any failures. Using --retry-all-errors makes curl treat all transfers failures as
reason for retry.

For example: retry up to 12 times for all errors:

curl --retry 12 --retry-all-errors https://example.com

Resuming and ranges

Resuming a download means first checking the size of what is already present locally and then asking the
server to send the rest of it so it can be appended. curl also allows resuming the transfer at a custom point
without actually having anything already locally present.

curl supports resumed downloads on several protocols. Tell it where to start the transfer with the -C, --
continue-at option that takes either a plain numerical byte counter offset where to start or the string -
that asks curl to figure it out itself based on what it knows. When using - , curl will use the destination file
name to figure out how much data that is already present locally and ask use that as an offset when asking
for more data from the server.

To start downloading an FTP file from byte offset 100:

curl --continue-at 100 ftp://example.com/bigfile

Continue downloading a previously interrupted download:

curl --continue-at - http://example.com/bigfile -O

If you instead just want a specific byte range from the remote resource transferred, you can ask for only that.
For example, when you only want 1000 bytes from offset 100 to avoid having to download the entire huge
remote file:

curl --range 100-1099 http://example.com/bigfile

Uploads

Uploading is a term for sending data to a remote server. Uploading is done differently for each protocol, and
several protocols may even allow different ways of uploading data.
Protocols allowing upload
You can upload data using one of these protocols: FILE, FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, SCP,
SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS and TFTP.

HTTP offers several "uploads"

HTTP, and its bigger brother HTTPS, offer several different ways to upload data to a server and curl
provides easy command-line options to do it the three most common ways, described below.

An interesting detail with HTTP is also that an upload can also be a download, in the same operation and in
fact many downloads are initiated with an HTTP POST.

POST

POST is the HTTP method that was invented to send data to a receiving web application, and it is, for
example, how most common HTML forms on the web work. It usually sends a chunk of relatively small
amounts of data to the receiver.

The upload kind is usually done with the -d or --data options, but there are a few additional alterations.

Read the detailed description on how to do this with curl in the HTTP POST with curl chapter.

multipart formpost

Multipart formposts are also used in HTML forms on websites; typically when there is a file upload involved.
This type of upload is also an HTTP POST but it sends the data formatted according to some special rules,
which is what the "multipart" name means.

Since it sends the data formatted completely differently, you cannot select which type of POST to use at your
own whim but it entirely depends on what the receiving server end expects and can handle.

HTTP multipart formposts are done with -F . See the detailed description in the HTTP multipart formposts
chapter.

PUT

HTTP PUT is the upload method that was designed to send a complete resource meant to be put as-is on
the remote site or even replace an existing resource there. That said, this is also the least used upload
method for HTTP on the web today and lots, if not most, web servers do not even have PUT enabled.

You send off an HTTP upload using the -T option with the file to upload:

curl -T uploadthis http://example.com/

FTP uploads
Working with FTP, you get to see the remote file system you will be accessing. You tell the server exactly in
which directory you want the upload to be placed and which file name to use. If you specify the upload URL
with a trailing slash, curl will append the locally used file name to the URL and then that will be the file name
used when stored remotely:

curl -T uploadthis ftp://example.com/this/directory/

So if you prefer to select a different file name on the remote side than what you have used locally, you
specify it in the URL:

curl -T uploadthis ftp://example.com/this/directory/remotename

Learn much more about FTPing in the FTP with curl section.

SMTP uploads
You may not consider sending an email to be "uploading", but to curl it is. You upload the mail body to the
SMTP server. With SMTP, you also need to include all the mail headers you need (To:, From:, Date:, etc.) in
the mail body as curl will not add any at all.

curl -T mail smtp://mail.example.com/ --mail-from [email protected]

Learn more about using SMTP with curl in the Using curl/SMTP section.

Progress meter for uploads

The general progress meter curl provides (see the Progress meter section) works fine for uploads as well.
What needs to be remembered is that the progress meter is automatically disabled when you are sending
output to stdout, and most protocols curl support can output something even for an upload.

Therefore, you may need to explicitly redirect the downloaded data to a file (using shell redirect '>', -o or
similar) to get the progress meter displayed for upload.

Transfer controls

curl offers several different knobs and levers to control how transfers are performed. How fast to let them go,
how slow to let them run and how to do multiple transfers.

Stop slow transfers

 Rate limiting
Request rate limiting

Stop slow transfers

Having a fixed maximum time for a curl operation can be cumbersome, especially if you, for example, do
scripted transfers and the file sizes and transfer times vary a lot. A fixed timeout value then needs to be set
unnecessarily high to cover for worst cases.

As an alternative to a fixed time-out, you can tell curl to abandon the transfer if it gets below a certain speed
and stays below that threshold for a specific period of time.

For example, if a transfer speed goes below 1000 bytes per second during 15 seconds, stop it:

curl --speed-time 15 --speed-limit 1000 https://example.com/

Rate limiting

When curl transfers data, it will attempt to do that as fast as possible. It goes for both uploads and
downloads. Exactly how fast that will be depends on several factors, including your computer's ability, your
own network connection's bandwidth, the load on the remote server you are transferring to/from and the
latency to that server. And your curl transfers are also likely to compete with other transfers on the networks
the data travels over, from other users or just other apps by the same user.

In many setups, however, you will find that you can more or less saturate your own network connection with
a single curl command line. If you have a 10 megabit per second connection to the Internet, chances are curl
can use all of those 10 megabits to transfer data.

For most use cases, using as much bandwidth as possible is a good thing. It makes the transfer faster, it
makes the curl command complete sooner and it will make the transfer use resources from the server for a
shorter period of time.

Sometimes you will, however, find that having curl starve out other network functions on your local network
connection is inconvenient. In these situations you may want to tell curl to slow down so that other network
users get a better chance to get their data through as well. With --limit-rate [speed] you can tell
curl to not go faster than the given number of bytes per second. The rate limit value can be given with a letter
suffix using one of K, M and G for kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes.

To make curl not download data any faster than 200 kilobytes per second:

curl https://example.com/ --limit-rate 200K

The given limit is the maximum average speed allowed, counted during the entire transfer. It means that curl
might use higher transfer speeds in short bursts, but over time it uses no more than the given rate.
Also note that curl never knows what the maximum possible speed is—it will simply go as fast as it can and
is allowed. You may know your connection's maximum speed, but curl does not.

Request rate limiting

When told to do multiple transfer in a single command line, there might be times when a user would like to
rather have those multiple transfers done slower than as fast as possible. We call that request rate limiting.

With the --rate option, you specify the maximum transfer frequency you allow curl to use - in number of
transfer starts per time unit (sometimes called request rate). Without this option, curl will start the next
transfer as fast as possible.

If given several URLs and a transfer completes faster than the allowed rate, curl will wait until the next
transfer is started to maintain the requested rate. This option is for serial transfers and has no effect when --
parallel is used.

The request rate is provided as N/U where N is an integer number and U is a time unit. Supported units are
s (second), m (minute), h (hour) and d (day, as in a 24 hour unit). The default time unit, if no /U is
provided, is number of transfers per hour.

If curl is told to allow 10 requests per minute, it will not start the next request until 6 seconds have elapsed
since the previous transfer was started.

This function uses millisecond resolution. If the allowed frequency is set more than 1000 per second, it will
instead run unrestricted.

When retrying transfers, enabled with --retry, the separate retry delay logic is used and not this setting.

If this option is used several times, the last one will be used.

Examples
Make curl download 100 images but doing it no faster than 2 transfers per second:

curl --rate 2/s -O https://example.com/[1-100].jpg

Make curl download 10 images but doing it no faster than 3 transfers per hour:

curl --rate 3/h -O https://example.com/[1-10].jpg

Make curl download 200 images but not faster than 14 transfers per minute:

curl --rate 14/m -O https://example.com/[1-200].jpg

Connections

Most of the protocols you use with curl speak TCP. With TCP, a client such as curl must first figure out the IP
address(es) of the host you want to communicate with, then connect to it. "Connecting to it" means
performing a TCP protocol handshake.

For ordinary command line usage, operating on a URL, these are details which are taken care of under the
hood, and which you can mostly ignore. But at times you might find yourself wanting to tweak the specifics…

Name resolve tricks

Connection timeout

Network interface
Local port number

Keep alive

Name resolve tricks

curl offers many ways to make use another host than the one it normally would connect to.

Edit the hosts file

Maybe you want the command curl http://example.com to connect to your local server instead of
the actual server.

You can normally and easily do that by editing your hosts file ( /etc/hosts on Linux and Unix-like
systems) and adding, for example, 127.0.0.1 example.com to redirect the host to your localhost.
However this edit requires admin access and it has the downside that it affects all other applications at the
same time.

Change the Host: header

The Host: header is the normal way an HTTP client tells the HTTP server which server it speaks to, as
typically an HTTP server serves many different names using the same software instance.

So, by passing in a custom modified Host: header you can have the server respond with the contents of
the site even when you did not actually connect to that host name.

For example, you run a test instance of your main site www.example.com on your local machine and you
want to have curl ask for the index html:
 curl -H "Host: www.example.com" http://localhost/

When setting a custom Host: header and using cookies, curl will extract the custom name and use that as
host when matching cookies to send off.

The Host: header is not enough when communicating with an HTTPS server. With HTTPS there is a
separate extension field in the TLS protocol called SNI (Server Name Indication) that lets the client tell the
server the name of the server it wants to talk to. curl will only extract the SNI name to send from the given
URL.

Provide a custom IP address for a name

Do you know better than the name resolver where curl should go? Then you can give an IP address to curl
yourself! If you want to redirect port 80 access for example.com to instead reach your localhost:

curl --resolve example.com:80:127.0.0.1 http://example.com/

You can even specify multiple --resolve switches to provide multiple redirects of this sort, which can be
handy if the URL you work with uses HTTP redirects or if you just want to have your command line work
with multiple URLs.

--resolve inserts the address into curl's DNS cache, so it will effectively make curl believe that is the
address it got when it resolved the name.

When talking HTTPS, this will send SNI for the name in the URL and curl will verify the server's response to
make sure it serves for the name in the URL.

The pattern you specify in the option needs be a host name and its corresponding port number and only if
that exact pair is used in the URL will the address be substituted. For example, if you want to replace a host
name in an HTTPS URL on its default port number, you need to tell curl it is for port 443, like:

curl --resolve example.com:443:192.168.0.1 https://example.com/

Provide a replacement name

As a close relative to the --resolve option, the --connect-to option provides a minor variation. It
allows you to specify a replacement name and port number for curl to use under the hood when a specific
name and port number is used to connect.

For example, suppose you have a single site called www.example.com that in turn is actually served by
three different individual HTTP servers: load1, load2 and load3, for load balancing purposes. In a typical
normal procedure, curl resolves the main site and gets to speak to one of the load balanced servers (as it
gets a list back and just picks one of them) and all is well. If you want to send a test request to one specific
server out of the load balanced set ( load1.example.com for example) you can instruct curl to do that.
You can still use --resolve to accomplish this if you know the specific IP address of load1. But without
having to first resolve and fix the IP address separately, you can tell curl:

curl --connect-to www.example.com:80:load1.example.com:80 http://www.example.com

It redirects from a SOURCE NAME + SOURCE PORT to a DESTINATION NAME + DESTINATION PORT.
curl will then resolve the load1.example.com name and connect, but in all other ways still assume it is
talking to www.example.com .

Name resolve tricks with c-ares

As should be detailed elsewhere in this book, curl may be built with several different name resolving
backends. One of those backends is powered by the c-ares library and when curl is built to use c-ares, it
gets a few extra superpowers that curl built to use other name resolve backends do not get. Namely, it gains
the ability to more specifically instruct what DNS servers to use and how that DNS traffic is using the
network.

With --dns-servers , you can specify exactly which DNS server curl should use instead of the default
one. This lets you run your own experimental server that answers differently, or use a backup one if your
regular one is unreliable or dead.

With --dns-ipv4-addr and --dns-ipv6-addr you ask curl to "bind" its local end of the DNS
communication to a specific IP address and with --dns-interface you can instruct curl to use a
specific network interface to use for its DNS requests.

These --dns-* options are advanced and are only meant for people who know what they are doing and
understand what these options do. But they offer customizable DNS name resolution operations.

Connection timeout

curl will typically make a TCP connection to the host as an initial part of its network transfer. This TCP
connection can fail or be slow, if there are shaky network conditions or faulty remote servers.

To reduce the impact on your scripts or other use, you can set the maximum time in seconds which curl will
allow for the connection attempt. With --connect-timeout you tell curl the maximum time to allow for
connecting, and if curl has not connected in that time it returns a failure.

The connection timeout only limits the time curl is allowed to spend up until the moment it connects, so once
the TCP connection has been established it can take longer time. See the Timeouts section for more on
generic curl timeouts.

If you specify a low timeout, you effectively disable curl's ability to connect to remote servers, slow servers or
servers you access over unreliable networks.

The connection timeout can be specified as a decimal value for sub-second precision. For example, to allow
2781 milliseconds to connect:

curl --connect-timeout 2.781 https://example.com/

Network interface

On machines with multiple network interfaces that are connected to multiple networks, there are situations
where you can decide which network interface you would prefer the outgoing network traffic to use. Or which
originating IP address (out of the multiple ones you have) to use in the communication.

Tell curl which network interface, which IP address or even host name that you would like to "bind" your
local end of the communication to, with the --interface option:

curl --interface eth1 https://www.example.com/

curl --interface 192.168.0.2 https://www.example.com/

curl --interface machine2 https://www.example.com/

Local port number

A TCP connection is created between an IP address and a port number in the local end and an IP address
and a port number in the remote end. The remote port number can be specified in the URL and usually
helps identify which service you are targeting.

The local port number is usually randomly assigned to your TCP connection by the network stack and you
normally do not have to think about it much further. However, in some circumstances you find yourself
behind network equipment, firewalls or similar setups that put restrictions on what source port numbers that
can be allowed to set up the outgoing connections.

For situations like this, you can specify which local ports curl should bind the connection to. You can specify
a single port number to use, or a range of ports. We recommend using a range because ports are scarce
resources and the exact one you want may already be in use. If you ask for a local port number (or range)
that curl cannot obtain for you, it will exit with a failure.

Also, on most operating systems you cannot bind to port numbers below 1024 without having a higher
privilege level (root) and we generally advise against running curl as root if you can avoid it.

Ask curl to use a local port number between 4000 and 4200 when getting this HTTPS page:

curl --local-port 4000-4200 https://example.com/

Keep alive
TCP connections can be totally without traffic in either direction when they are not used. A totally idle
connection can therefore not be clearly separated from a connection that has gone completely stale
because of network or server issues.

At the same time, lots of network equipment such as firewalls or NATs are keeping track of TCP connections
these days, so that they can translate addresses, block "wrong" incoming packets, etc. These devices often
count completely idle connections as dead after N minutes, where N varies between device to device but at
times is as short as 10 minutes or even less.

One way to help avoid a really slow connection (or an idle one) getting treated as dead and wrongly killed,
is to make sure TCP keep alive is used. TCP keepalive is a feature in the TCP protocol that makes it send
"ping frames" back and forth when it would otherwise be totally idle. It helps idle connections to detect
breakage even when no traffic is moving over it, and helps intermediate systems not consider the
connection dead.

curl uses TCP keepalive by default for the reasons mentioned here. But there might be times when you want
to disable keepalive or you may want to change the interval between the TCP "pings" (curl defaults to 60
seconds). You can switch off keepalive with:

curl --no-keepalive https://example.com/

or change the interval to 5 minutes (300 seconds) with:

curl --keepalive-time 300 https://example.com/

Timeouts

Network operations are by their nature rather unreliable or perhaps fragile operations as they depend on a
set of services and networks to be up and working for things to work. The availability of these services can
come and go and the performance of them may also vary greatly from time to time.

The design of TCP even allows the network to get completely disconnected for an extended period of time
without it necessarily getting noticed by the participants in the transfer.

The result of this is that sometimes Internet transfers take a long time. Further, most operations in curl have
no time-out by default!

Maximum time allowed to spend

Tell curl with -m / --max-time the maximum time, in seconds, that you allow the command line to
spend before curl exits with a timeout error code (28). When the set time has elapsed, curl will exit no matter
what is going on at that moment—including if it is transferring data. It really is the maximum time allowed.
The given maximum time can be specified with a decimal precision; 0.5 means 500 milliseconds and
2.37 equals 2370 milliseconds.
Example:

curl --max-time 5.5 https://example.com/

(Your locale may use another symbol than a dot for expressing numerical fractions.)

Never spend more than this to connect

--connect-timeout limits the time curl will spend trying to connect to the host. All the necessary steps
done before the connection is considered complete have to be completed within the given time frame.
Failing to connect within the given time will cause curl to exit with a timeout exit code (28).

The given maximum connect time can be specified with a decimal precision; 0.5 means 500 milliseconds
and 2.37 equals 2370 milliseconds:

curl --connect-timeout 2.37 https://example.com/

.netrc

Unix systems have for a long time offered a way for users to store their user name and password for remote
FTP servers. ftp clients have supported this for decades and this way allowed users to quickly login to
known servers without manually having to reenter the credentials each time. The .netrc file is typically
stored in a user's home directory. (On Windows, curl will look for it with the name _netrc ).

This being a widespread and well used concept, curl also supports it—if you ask it to. curl does not,
however, limit this feature to FTP, but can get credentials for machines for any protocol with this. See further
below for how.

The .netrc file format

The .netrc file format is simple: you specify lines with a machine name and follow that with the login and
password that are associated with that machine.

Each field is provided as a sequence of letters that ends with a space or newline. Since 7.84.0, curl also
supports quoted strings. They start and end with double quotes ( " ) and support the escaped special letters
\" , (newline), (carriage return), and (TAB). Quoted strings are the only way a space character can be
used in a user name or password.

machine name
Identifies a remote machine name. curl searches the .netrc file for a machine token that matches the remote
machine specified in the URL. Once a match is made, the subsequent .netrc tokens are processed, stopping
when the end of file is reached or another machine is encountered.

default

This is the same as machine name except that default matches any name. There can be only one
default token, and it must be after all machine tokens. To provide a default anonymous login for hosts that
are not otherwise matched, add a line similar to this in the end:

default login anonymous password user@domain

login name

The user name string for the remote machine. You cannot use a space in the name.

password string

Supply a password. If this token is present, curl will supply the specified string if the remote server requires a
password as part of the login process. Note that if this token is present in the .netrc file you really should
make sure the file is not readable by anyone besides the user. You cannot use a space when you enter the
password.

macdef name

Define a macro. This is not supported by curl. In order for the rest of the .netrc to still work fine, curl will
properly skip every definition done with macdef that it finds.

Example
An example .netrc for the host example.com with a user named 'daniel', using the password 'qwerty' would
look like:

machine example.com
login daniel
password qwerty

It can also be written on a single line with the same functionality:

machine example.com login daniel password qwerty

User name matching

When a URL is provided with a user name and .netrc is used, then curl will try to find the matching password
for that machine and login combination

Enable netrc
-n, --netrc tells curl to look for and use the .netrc file.

--netrc-file [file] is similar to --netrc , except that you also provide the path to the actual file
to use. This is useful when you want to provide the information in another directory or with another file name.

--netrc-optional is similar to --netrc , but this option makes the .netrc usage optional and not
mandatory as the --netrc option.

Proxies

A proxy is a machine or software that does something on behalf of you, the client.

You can also see it as a middle man that sits between you and the server you want to work with, a middle
man that you connect to instead of the actual remote server. You ask the proxy to perform your desired
operation for you and then it will run off and do that and then return the data to you.

There are several different types of proxies and we shall list and discuss them in subsections below.

Discover your proxy

PAC
Captive portals
Proxy type

HTTP proxy
SOCKS proxy
MITM proxy
Authentication

HTTPS proxy
Proxy environment variables
Proxy headers

Discover your proxy

Some networks are setup to require a proxy in order for you to reach the Internet or perhaps that special
network you are interested in. The use of proxies are introduced on your network by the people and
management that run your network for policy or technical reasons.
In the networking space there are a few methods for the automatic detection of proxies and how to connect
to them, but none of those methods are truly universal and curl supports none of them. Furthermore, when
you communicate to the outside world through a proxy that often means that you have to put a lot of trust on
the proxy as it will be able to see and modify all the non-secure network traffic you send or get through it.
That trust is not easy to assume automatically.

If you check your browser's network settings, sometimes under an advanced settings tab, you can learn
what proxy or proxies your browser is configured to use. Chances are big that you should use the same one
or ones when you use curl.

As an example, you can find proxy settings for Firefox browser in Preferences => General => Network
Settings as shown below:

Could not load image

proxy settings for Firefox

PAC

Some network environments provides several different proxies that should be used in different situations,
and a customizable way to handle that is supported by the browsers. This is called "proxy auto-config", or
PAC.

A PAC file contains a JavaScript function that decides which proxy a given network connection (URL)
should use, and even if it should not use a proxy at all. Browsers most typically read the PAC file off a URL
on the local network.

Since curl has no JavaScript capabilities, curl does not support PAC files. If your browser and network use
PAC files, the easiest route forward is usually to read the PAC file manually and figure out the proxy you
need to specify to run curl successfully.
Captive portals
These are not proxies but they are blocking the way between you and the server you want to access.

A "captive portal" is one of these systems that are popular to use in hotels, airports and for other sorts of
network access to a larger audience. The portal will "capture" all network traffic and redirect you to a login
web page until you have either clicked OK and verified that you have read their conditions or perhaps even
made sure that you have paid plenty of money for the right to use the network.

curl's traffic will of course also captured by such portals and often the best way is to use a browser to accept
the conditions and "get rid of" the portal since from then on they often allow all other traffic originating from
that same machine (MAC address) for a period of time.

Most often you can use curl too to submit that affirmation, if you just figure out how to submit the form and
what fields to include in it. If this is something you end up doing many times, it may be worth exploring.

Proxy type

curl supports several different types of proxies.

The default proxy type is HTTP so if you specify a proxy host name (or IP address) without a scheme part
(the part that is often written as http:// ) curl goes with assuming it's an HTTP proxy.

curl provides a number of options to set the proxy type instead of using the scheme prefix. See the SOCKS
section.

HTTP proxy

An HTTP proxy is a proxy that the client speaks HTTP with to get the transfer done. curl will, by default,
assume that a host you point out with -x or --proxy is an HTTP proxy, and unless you also specify a
port number it will default to port 1080 (and the reason for that particular port number is purely historical).

If you want to request the example.com web page using a proxy on 192.168.0.1 port 8080, a command line
could look like:

curl -x 192.168.0.1:8080 http://example.com/

Recall that the proxy receives your request, forwards it to the real server, then reads the response from the
server and then hands that back to the client.

If you enable verbose mode with -v when talking to a proxy, you will see that curl connects to the proxy
instead of the remote server, and you will see that it uses a slightly different request line.

HTTPS with HTTP proxy

HTTPS was designed to allow and provide secure and safe end-to-end privacy from the client to the server
(and back). In order to provide that when speaking to an HTTP proxy, the HTTP protocol has a special
request that curl uses to setup a tunnel through the proxy that it then can encrypt and verify. This HTTP
method is known as CONNECT .

When the proxy tunnels encrypted data through to the remote server after a CONNECT method sets it up,
the proxy cannot see nor modify the traffic without breaking the encryption:

curl -x proxy.example.com:80 https://example.com/

Non-HTTP protocols over an HTTP proxy

An "HTTP proxy" means the proxy itself speaks HTTP. HTTP proxies are primarily used to proxy HTTP but
it is also fairly common that they support other protocols as well. In particular, FTP is fairly commonly
supported.

When talking FTP "over" an HTTP proxy, it is usually done by more or less pretending the other protocol
works like HTTP and asking the proxy to "get this URL" even if the URL is not using HTTP. This distinction
is important because it means that when sent over an HTTP proxy like this, curl does not really speak FTP
even though given an FTP URL; thus FTP-specific features will not work:

curl -x http://proxy.example.com:80 ftp://ftp.example.com/file.txt

What you can do instead then, is to "tunnel through" the HTTP proxy!

HTTP proxy tunneling

Most HTTP proxies allow clients to "tunnel through" it to a server on the other side. That is exactly what's
done every time you use HTTPS through the HTTP proxy.

You tunnel through an HTTP proxy with curl using -p or --proxytunnel .

When you do HTTPS through a proxy you normally connect through to the default HTTPS remote TCP port
number 443, so therefore you will find that most HTTP proxies white list and allow connections only to hosts
on that port number and perhaps a few others. Most proxies will deny clients from connecting to just any
random port (for reasons only the proxy administrators know).

Still, assuming that the HTTP proxy allows it, you can ask it to tunnel through to a remote server on any port
number so you can do other protocols "normally" even when tunneling. You can do FTP tunneling like this:

curl -p -x http://proxy.example.com:80 ftp://ftp.example.com/file.txt

You can tell curl to use HTTP/1.0 in its CONNECT request issued to the HTTP proxy by using --
proxy1.0 [proxy] instead of -x .

SOCKS proxy

SOCKS is a protocol used for proxies and curl supports it. curl supports both SOCKS version 4 as well as
version 5, and both versions come in two flavors.

You can select the specific SOCKS version to use by using the correct scheme part for the given proxy host
with -x , or you can specify it with a separate option instead of -x .

SOCKS4 is for the version 4 and SOCKS4a is for the version 4 without resolving the host name locally:

curl -x socks4://proxy.example.com http://www.example.com/

curl --socks4 proxy.example.com http://www.example.com/

The SOCKS4a versions:

curl -x socks4a://proxy.example.com http://www.example.com/

curl --socks4a proxy.example.com http://www.example.com/

SOCKS5 is for the version 5 and SOCKS5-hostname is for the version 5 without resolving the host name
locally:

curl -x socks5://proxy.example.com http://www.example.com/

curl --socks5 proxy.example.com http://www.example.com/

The SOCKS5-hostname versions. This sends the host name to the server so there is no name resolving
done locally:

curl -x socks5h://proxy.example.com http://www.example.com/

curl --socks5-hostname proxy.example.com http://www.example.com/

MITM proxy

MITM means Man-In-The-Middle. MITM proxies are usually deployed by companies in "enterprise
environments" and elsewhere, where the owners of the network have a desire to investigate even TLS
encrypted traffic.
To do this, they require users to install a custom "trust root" (Certificate Authority (CA) certificate) in the client,
and then the proxy terminates all TLS traffic from the client, impersonates the remote server and acts like a
proxy. The proxy then sends back a generated certificate signed by the custom CA. Such proxy setups
usually transparently capture all traffic from clients to TCP port 443 on a remote machine. Running curl in
such a network would also get its HTTPS traffic captured
This practice, of course, allows the middle man to decrypt and snoop on all TLS traffic.

Authentication

HTTP and SOCKS proxies can require authentication, so curl then needs to provide the proper credentials
to the proxy to be allowed to use it, and failing to do will only make the proxy return HTTP responses using
code 407.

Authentication for proxies is similar to "normal" HTTP authentication. It is separate from the server
authentication to allow clients to independently use both normal host authentication as well as proxy
authentication.

With curl, you set the user name and password for the proxy authentication with the -U user:password
or --proxy-user user:password option:

curl -U daniel:secr3t -x myproxy:80 http://example.com

This example will default to using the Basic authentication scheme. Some proxies will require another
authentication scheme (and the headers that are returned when you get a 407 response will tell you which)
and then you can ask for a specific method with --proxy-digest , --proxy-negotiate , --
proxy-ntlm . The above example command again, but asking for NTLM auth with the proxy:

curl -U daniel:secr3t -x myproxy:80 http://example.com --proxy-ntlm

There is also the option that asks curl to figure out which method the proxy wants and supports and then go
with that (with the possible expense of extra round-trips) using --proxy-anyauth . Asking curl to use any
method the proxy wants is then like this:

curl -U daniel:secr3t -x myproxy:80 http://example.com --proxy-anyauth

HTTPS proxy

All the other mentioned protocols to speak with the proxy are clear text protocols, HTTP and the SOCKS
versions. Using those methods could allow someone to eavesdrop on your traffic the local network where
you or the proxy reside. Because over the connection between curl and the proxy, the data is sent in the
clear.

One solution for that is to use an HTTPS proxy, speaking HTTPS to the proxy, which then establishes a
secure and encrypted connection that is safe from easy surveillance
When an HTTPS proxy is specified, the default port used on that host will be 443.

In all other ways, HTTPS proxies work like HTTP proxies.

Proxy environment variables

curl checks for the existence of specially named environment variables before it runs to see if a proxy is
requested to get used.

You specify the proxy by setting a variable named [scheme]_proxy to hold the proxy host name (the
same way you would specify the host with -x ). So if you want to tell curl to use a proxy when access an
HTTP server, you set the 'http_proxy' environment variable. Like this:

http_proxy=http://proxy.example.com:80
curl -v www.example.com

While the above example shows HTTP, you can, of course, also set ftp_proxy, https_proxy, and so on. All
these proxy environment variable names except http_proxy can also be specified in uppercase, like
HTTPS_PROXY.

To set a single variable that controls all protocols, the ALL_PROXY exists. If a specific protocol variable one
exists, such a one will take precedence.

When using environment variables to set a proxy, you could easily end up in a situation where one or a few
host names should be excluded from going through the proxy. This is then done with the NO_PROXY
variable. Set that to a comma- separated list of host names that should not use a proxy when being
accessed. You can set NO_PROXY to be a single asterisk ('*') to match all hosts.

As an alternative to the NO_PROXY variable, there is also a --noproxy command line option that serves
the same purpose and works the same way.

http_proxy in lower case only

The HTTP version of the proxy environment variables is treated differently than the others. It is only
accepted in its lower case version because of the CGI protocol, which lets users run scripts in a server when
invoked by an HTTP server. When a CGI script is invoked by a server, it automatically creates environment
variables for the script based on the incoming headers in the request. Those environment variables are
prefixed with uppercase HTTP_ !

An incoming request to an HTTP server using a request header like Proxy: yada will therefore create
the environment variable HTTP_PROXY set to contain yada before the CGI script is started. If that CGI
script runs curl…

Accepting the upper case version of this environment variable has been the source for many security
problems in lots of software through times.
Proxy headers

When you want to add HTTP headers meant specifically for an HTTP or HTTPS proxy, and not for the
remote server, the --header option falls short.

For example, if you issue an HTTPS request through an HTTP proxy, it will be done by first issuing a
CONNECT to the proxy that establishes a tunnel to the remote server and then it sends the request to that
server. That first CONNECT is only issued to the proxy and you may want to make sure only that receives
your special header, and send another set of custom headers to the remote server.

Set a specific different User-Agent: only to the proxy:

curl --proxy-header "User-Agent: magic/3000" -x proxy https://example.com/

Exit status

A lot of effort has gone into the project to make curl return a usable exit code when something goes wrong
and it will always return 0 (zero) when the operation went as planned.

If you write a shell script or batch file that invokes curl, you can always check the return code to detect
problems in the invoked command. Below, you will find a list of return codes as of the time of this writing.
Over time we tend to slowly add new ones so if you get a code back not listed here, please refer to more
updated curl documentation for aid.

A basic Unix shell script could look like something like this:

#!/bin/sh
curl http://example.com
res=$?
if test "$res" != "0"; then
echo "the curl command failed with: $res"
fi

Available exit codes

1. Unsupported protocol. This build of curl has no support for this protocol. Usually this happens because
the URL was misspelled to use a scheme part that either has a space in front of it or spells http like
htpt or similar. Another common mistake is that you use a libcurl installation that was built with one or
more protocols disabled and you now ask libcurl to use one of those protocols that were disabled in the
build.
2. Failed to initialize. This is mostly an internal error or a problem with the libcurl installation or system
libcurl runs in.
3. URL malformed. The syntax was not correct. This happens when you mistype a URL so that it ends up
wrong, or in rare situations you are using a URL that is accepted by another tool that curl does not
support only because there is no universal URL standard that everyone adheres to.

4. A feature or option that was needed to perform the desired request was not enabled or was explicitly
disabled at build-time. To make curl able to do this, you probably need another build of libcurl.
5. Couldn't resolve proxy. The address of the given proxy host could not be resolved. Either the given
proxy name is just wrong, or the DNS server is misbehaving and does not know about this name when it
should or perhaps even the system you run curl on is misconfigured so that it does not find/use the
correct DNS server.

6. Couldn't resolve host. The given remote host's address was not resolved. The address of the given
server could not be resolved. Either the given host name is just wrong, or the DNS server is
misbehaving and does not know about this name when it should or perhaps even the system you run
curl on is misconfigured so that it does not find/use the correct DNS server.
7. Failed to connect to host. curl managed to get an IP address to the machine and it tried to setup a TCP
connection to the host but failed. This can be because you have specified the wrong port number,
entered the wrong host name, the wrong protocol or perhaps because there is a firewall or another
network equipment in between that blocks the traffic from getting through.
8. Unknown FTP server response. The server sent data curl could not parse. This is either because of a
bug in curl, a bug in the server or because the server is using an FTP protocol extension that curl does
not support. The only real work-around for this is to tweak curl options to try it to use other FTP
commands that perhaps will not get this unknown server response back.

9. FTP access denied. The server denied login or denied access to the particular resource or directory you
wanted to reach. Most often you tried to change to a directory that does not exist on the server. The
directory of course is what you specify in the URL.

10. FTP accept failed. While waiting for the server to connect back when an active FTP session is used,
an error code was sent over the control connection or similar.
11. FTP weird PASS reply. Curl could not parse the reply sent to the PASS request. PASS in the command
curl sends the password to the server with, and even anonymous connections to FTP server actually
sends a password - a fixed anonymous string. Getting a response back from this command that curl
does not understand is a strong indication that this is not an FTP server at all or that the server is badly
broken.
12. During an active FTP session (PORT is used) while waiting for the server to connect, the timeout
expired. It took too long for the server to get back. This is usually a sign that something is preventing
the server from reaching curl successfully. Like a firewall or other network arrangements. .
13. Unknown response to FTP PASV command, Curl could not parse the reply sent to the PASV request.
This is a strange server. PASV is used to setup the second data transfer connection in passive mode,
see the FTP uses two connections section for more on that. You might be able to work-around this
problem by using PORT instead, with the --ftp-port option.

14. Unknown FTP 227 format. Curl could not parse the 227-line the server sent. This is most certainly a
broken server. A 227 is the FTP server's response when sending back information on how curl should
connect back to it in passive mode. You might be able to work-around this problem by using PORT
instead, with the --ftp-port option.

15
15. FTP cannot get host. Couldn't use the host IP address we got in the 227-line. This is most likely an
internal error.
16. HTTP/2 error. A problem was detected in the HTTP2 framing layer. This is somewhat generic and can
be one out of several problems, see the error message for details.
17. FTP could not set binary. Couldn't change transfer method to binary. This server is broken. curl needs
to set the transfer to the correct mode before it is started as otherwise the transfer cannot work.
18. Partial file. Only a part of the file was transferred. When the transfer is considered complete, curl will
verify that it actually received the same amount of data that it was told before-hand that it was going to
get. If the two numbers do not match, this is the error code. It could mean that curl got fewer bytes than
advertised or that it got more. curl itself cannot know which number that is wrong or which is correct. If
any.
19. FTP could not download/access the given file. The RETR (or similar) command failed. curl got an error
from the server when trying to download the file.
20. Not used
21. Quote error. A quote command returned an error from the server. curl allows several different ways to
send custom commands to a IMAP, POP3, SMTP or FTP server and features a generic check that the
commands work. When any of the individually issued commands fails, this is exit status is returned.
The advice is generally to watch the headers in the FTP communication to better understand exactly
what failed and how.
22. HTTP page not retrieved. The requested URL was not found or returned another error with the HTTP
error code being 400 or above. This return code only appears if -f, --fail is used.
23. Write error. Curl could not write data to a local filesystem or similar. curl receives data chunk by chunk
from the network and it stores it like at (or writes it to stdout), one piece at a time. If that write action gets
an error, this is the exit status.
24. Not used
25. Upload failed. The server refused to accept or store the file that curl tried to send to it. This is usually
due to wrong access rights on the server but can also happen due to out of disk space or other
resource constraints. This error can happen for many protocols.
26. Read error. Various reading problems. The inverse to exit status 23. When curl sends data to a server,
it reads data chunk by chunk from a local file or stdin or similar, and if that reading fails in some way
this is the exit status curl will return.

27. Out of memory. A memory allocation request failed. curl needed to allocate more memory than what the
system was willing to give it and curl had to exit. Try using smaller files or make sure that curl gets
more memory to work with.
28. Operation timeout. The specified time-out period was reached according to the conditions. curl offers
several timeouts, and this exit code tells one of those timeout limits were reached. Extend the timeout
or try changing something else that allows curl to finish its operation faster. Often, this happens due to
network and remote server situations that you cannot affect locally.
29. Not used
30. FTP PORT failed. The PORT command failed. Not all FTP servers support the PORT command; try
doing a transfer using PASV instead. The PORT command is used to ask the server to create the data
connection by connecting back to curl. See also the FTP uses two connections section.

31. FTP could not use REST. The REST command failed. This command is used for resumed FTP
 transfers. curl needs to issue the REST command to do range or resumed transfers. The server is
broken, try the same operation without range/resume as a crude work-around.
32. Not used
33. HTTP range error. The range request did not work. Resumed HTTP requests are not necessary
acknowledged or supported, so this exit code signals that for this resource on this server, there can be
no range or resumed transfers.
34. HTTP post error. Internal post-request generation error. If you get this error, please report the exact
circumstances to the curl project.
35. A TLS/SSL connect error. The SSL handshake failed. The SSL handshake can fail due to numerous
different reasons so the error message may offer some additional clues. Maybe the parties could not
agree to a SSL/TLS version, an agreeable cipher suite or similar.
36. Bad download resume. Could not continue an earlier aborted download. When asking to resume a
transfer that then ends up not possible to do, this error can get returned. For FILE, FTP or SFTP.
37. Couldn't read the given file when using the FILE:// scheme. Failed to open the file. The file could be
non-existing or is it a permission problem perhaps?
38. LDAP cannot bind. LDAP "bind" operation failed, which is a necessary step in the LDAP operation and
thus this means the LDAP query could not be performed. This might happen because of wrong
username or password, or for other reasons.

39. LDAP search failed. The given search terms caused the LDAP search to return an error.
40. Not used
41. Not used
42. Aborted by callback. An application told libcurl to abort the operation. This error code is not generally
made visible to users and not to users of the curl tool.
43. Bad function argument. A function was called with a bad parameter - this return code is present to help
application authors to understand why libcurl cannot perform certain actions and should never be
return by the curl tool. Please file a bug report to the curl project if this happens to you.

44. Not used

45. Interface error. A specified outgoing network interface could not be used. curl will typically decide
outgoing network and IP addresses by itself but when explicitly asked to use a specific one that curl
cannot use, this error can occur.

46. Not used

47. Too many redirects. When following HTTP redirects, libcurl hit the maximum number set by the
application. The maximum number of redirects is unlimited by libcurl but is set to 50 by default by the
curl tool. The limit is present to stop endless redirect loops. Change the limit with --max-redirs .
48. Unknown option specified to libcurl. This could happen if you use a curl version that is out of sync with
the underlying libcurl version. Perhaps your newer curl tries to use an option in the older libcurl that
was not introduced until after the libcurl version you are using but is known to your curl tool code as
that is newer. To decrease the risk of this and make sure it does not happen: use curl and libcurl of the
same version number.

49. Malformed telnet option. The telnet options you provide to curl was not using the correct syntax.
50. Not used

51. The server's SSL/TLS certificate or SSH fingerprint failed verification. curl can then not be sure of the
 server being who it claims to be. See the using TLS with curl section for more TLS details and using
SCP and SFTP with curl for more SSH specific details.
52. The server did not reply anything, which in this context is considered an error. When an HTTP(S)
server responds to an HTTP(S) request, it will always return something as long as it is alive and
sound. All valid HTTP responses have a status line and responses header. Not getting anything at all
back is an indication the server is faulty or perhaps that something prevented curl from reaching the
right server or that you are trying to connect to the wrong port number etc.
53. SSL crypto engine not found.

54. Cannot set SSL crypto engine as default.

55. Failed sending network data. Sending data over the network is a crucial part of most curl operations
and when curl gets an error from the lowest networking layers that the sending failed, this exit status
gets returned. To pinpoint why this happens, some serious digging is usually required. Start with
enabling verbose mode, do tracing and if possible check the network traffic with a tool like Wireshark
or similar.

56. Failure in receiving network data. Receiving data over the network is a crucial part of most curl
operations and when curl gets an error from the lowest networking layers that the receiving of data
failed, this exit status gets returned. To pinpoint why this happens, some serious digging is usually
required. Start with enabling verbose mode, do tracing and if possible check the network traffic with a
tool like Wireshark or similar.

57. Not used

58. Problem with the local certificate. The client certificate had a problem so it could not be used.
Permissions? The wrong pass phrase?

59. Couldn't use the specified SSL cipher. The cipher names need to be specified exact and they are also
unfortunately specific to the particular TLS backend curl has been built to use. For the current list of
support ciphers and how to write them, see the online docs at https://curl.se/docs/ssl-ciphers.html.

60. Peer certificate cannot be authenticated with known CA certificates. This usually means that the
certificate is either self-signed or signed by a CA (Certificate Authority) that is not present in the CA
store curl uses.
61. Unrecognized transfer encoding. Content received from the server could not be parsed by curl.

62. Not used

63. Maximum file size exceeded. When curl has been told to restrict downloads to not do it if the file is too
big, this is the exit code for that condition.

64. Requested SSL (TLS) level failed. In most cases this means that curl failed to upgrade the connection
to TLS when asked to.

65. Sending the data requires a rewind that failed. In some situations curl needs to rewind in order to send
the data again and if this can't be done, the operations fails.

66. Failed to initialize the OpenSSL SSL Engine. This can only happen when OpenSSL is used and
would signify a serious internal problem.

67. The user name, password, or similar was not accepted and curl failed to log in. Verify that the
credentials are provided correctly and that they are encoded the right way.

68. File not found on TFTP server.

69
69.
Permission problem on TFTP server.
70. Out of disk space on TFTP server.
71. Illegal TFTP operation.

72. Unknown TFTP transfer ID.

73. File already exists (TFTP).

74. No such user (TFTP).

75. Not used

76. Not used

77. Problem with reading the SSL CA cert. The default or specified CA cert bundle could not be read/used
to verify the server certificate.

78. The resource (file) referenced in the URL does not exist.
79. An unspecified error occurred during the SSH session. This sometimes indicate an incompatibility
problem between the SSH libcurl curl uses and the SSH version used by the server curl speaks to.
80. Failed to shut down the SSL connection.

81. Not used

82. Could not load CRL file, missing or wrong format

83. TLS certificate issuer check failed. The most common reason for this is that the server did not send the
proper intermediate certificate in the TLS handshake.

84. The FTP PRET command failed. This is a non-standard command and far from all servers support it.

85. RTSP: mismatch of CSeq numbers

86. RTSP: mismatch of Session Identifiers

87. Unable to parse FTP file list. The FTP directory listing format used by the server could not be parsed
by curl. FTP wildcards can not be used on this server.
88. FTP chunk callback reported error

89. No connection available, the session will be queued

90. SSL public key does not matched pinned public key. Either you provided a bad public key, or the
server has changed.
91. Invalid SSL certificate status. The server did not provide a proper valid certificate in the TLS
handshake.

92. Stream error in HTTP/2 framing layer. This is usually an unrecoverable error, but trying to force curl to
speak HTTP/1 instead might circumvent it.
93. An API function was called from inside a callback. If the curl tool returns this, something has gone
wrong internally

94. Authentication error.

95. HTTP/3 layer error. This is somewhat generic and can be one out of several problems, see the error
message for details.

96. QUIC connection error. This error may be caused by an TLS library error. QUIC is the transport protocol
used for HTTP/3.

97. Proxy handshake error. Usually that means that a SOCKS proxy did not play along.

98
 98. A TLS client certificate is required but was not provided.
99. An internal call to poll() or select() returned error that is not recoverable.

Error message

When curl exits with a non-zero code, it will also output an error message (unless --silent is used).
That error message may add some additional information or circumstances to the exit status number itself so
the same error number can get different error messages.

"Not used"
The list of exit codes above contains a number of values marked as 'not used'. Those are exit status codes
that are not used in modern versions of curl but that have been used or were intended to be used in the past.
They may be used in a future version of curl.

Additionally, the highest used error status in this list is 92, but there is no guarantee that a future curl version
will not add more exit codes after that number.

SCP and SFTP

curl supports the SCP and SFTP protocols if built with a prerequisite 3rd party library: libssh2, libssh or
wolfSSH.

SCP and SFTP are both protocols that are built on top of SSH, a secure and encrypted data protocol that is
similar to TLS but differs in a few important ways. For example, SSH does not use certificates of any sort but
instead it uses public and private keys. Both SSH and TLS provide strong crypto and secure transfers when
used correctly.

The SCP protocol is generally considered to be the black sheep of the two since it is not portable and
usually only works between Unix systems.

URLs
SFTP and SCP URLs are similar to other URLs and you download files using these protocols the same as
with others:

curl sftp://example.com/file.zip -u user

and:

curl scp://example.com/file.zip -u user

SFTP (but not SCP) supports getting a file listing back when the URL ends with a trailing slash:

curl sftp://example.com/ -u user

Note that both these protocols work with "users" and you do not ask for a file anonymously or with a
standard generic name. Most systems will require that users authenticate, as outlined below.

When requesting a file from an SFTP or SCP URL, the file path given is considered to be the absolute path
on the remote server unless you specifically ask for the path relative to the user's home directory. You do that
by making sure the path starts with /~/ . This is quite the opposite to how FTP URLs work and is a
common cause for confusion among users.

For user daniel to transfer todo.txt from his home directory, it would look similar to this:

curl sftp://example.com/~/todo.txt -u daniel

Authentication
Authentication with curl against an SSH server (when you specify an SCP or SFTP URL) is done like this:

1. curl connects to the server and learns which authentication methods that this server offers
2. curl then tries the offered methods one by one until one works or they all failed

curl will attempt to use your public key as found in the .ssh subdirectory in your home directory if the
server offers public key authentication. When doing do, you still need to tell curl which user name to use on
the server. For example, the user 'john' lists the entries in his home directory on the remote SFTP server
called 'sftp.example.com':

curl -u john: sftp://sftp.example.com/

If curl cannot authenticate with the public key for any reason, it will instead attempt to use the user name +
password if the server allows it and the credentials are passed on the command line.

For example, the same user from above has the password RHvxC6wUA on a remote system and can
download a file via SCP like this:

curl -u john:RHvxC6wUA -O scp://ssh.example.com/file.tar.gz

Known hosts
A secure network client needs to make sure that the remote host is exactly the host that it thinks it is
communicating with. With TLS based protocols, it is done by the client verifying the server's certificate.

With SSH protocols there are no server certificates, but instead each server can provide its unique key. And
unlike TLS, SSH has no certificate authorities or anything so the client simply has to make sure that the
host's key matches what it already knows (via other means) it should look like.

The matching of keys is typically done using hashes of the key and the file that the client stores the hashes
for known servers is often called known_hosts and is put in a dedicated SSH directory. On Linux systems
that is usually called ~/.ssh .

When curl connects to a SFTP and SCP host, it will make sure that the host's key hash is already present in
the known hosts file or it will deny continued operation because it cannot trust that the server is the right one.
Once the correct hash exists in known_hosts curl can perform transfers.

To force curl to skip checking and obeying to the known_hosts file, you can use the -k / --
insecure command-line option. You must use this option with extreme care since it makes it possible for
man-in-the-middle attacks not to be detected.

Reading email

There are two dominant protocols on the Internet for reading/downloading email from servers (at least if we
do not count web based reading), and they are IMAP and POP3. The former being the slightly more modern
alternative. curl supports both.

POP3
To list message numbers and sizes:

curl pop3://mail.example.com/

To download message 1:

curl pop3://mail.example.com/1

To delete message 1:

curl --request DELE pop3://mail.example.com/1

IMAP
Get the mail using the UID 57 from mailbox 'stuff':

curl imap://server.example.com/stuff;UID=57

Instead, get the mail with index 57 from the mailbox 'fun':

curl imap://server.example.com/fun;MAILINDEX=57

List the mails in the mailbox 'boring':

curl imap://server.example.com/boring

List the mails in the mailbox 'boring' and provide user and password:

curl imap://server.example.com/boring -u user:password

TLS for emails

POP3 and IMAP can both be done over a secure connection and both can be done using either explicit or
implicit TLS. The "explicit" method is probably the most common approach and it means that the client
connects to the server using an insecure connection and upgrades it to TLS as it goes, using the
STARTTLS command. You tell curl to attempt this with --ssl or if you want to insist on a secure
connection you use --ssl-reqd . Like this:

curl pop3://mail.example.com/ --ssl-reqd

or

curl --ssl imap://mail.example.com/inbox

"Implicit" SSL means that the connection gets secured already at first connect, which you make curl attempt
by specifying a scheme in the URL that uses SSL. In this case either pop3s:// or imaps:// . For such
connections, curl will insist on connecting and negotiating a TLS connection already from the start, or it will
fail its operation.

The previous explicit examples done with implicit SSL:

curl pop3s://mail.example.com/
or

curl imaps://mail.example.com/inbox

Sending email

Sending email with curl is done with the SMTP protocol. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.

curl supports sending data to an SMTP server, which combined with the right set of command line options
makes an email get sent to a set of receivers of your choice.

When sending SMTP with curl, there are two necessary command line options that must be used.

You need to tell the server at least one recipient with --mail-rcpt . You can use this option several
times and then curl will tell the server that all those email addresses should receive the email.

You need to tell the server which email address that is the sender of the email with --mail-from . It is
important to realize that this email address is not necessarily the same as is shown in the From: line of
the email text.

Then, you need to provide the actual email data. This is a (text) file formatted according to RFC 5322. It is a
set of headers and a body. Both the headers and the body need to be correctly encoded. The headers
typically include To: , From: , Subject: , Date: etc.

A basic command to send an email:

curl smtp://mail.example.com --mail-from [email protected] --mail-rcpt \

[email protected] --upload-file email.txt

Example email.txt

From: John Smith <[email protected]>

To: Joe Smith <[email protected]>
Subject: an example.com example email
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2016 08:45:16

Dear Joe,
Welcome to this example email. What a lovely day.

Secure mail transfer

Some mail providers allow or require using SSL for SMTP. They may use a dedicated port for SSL or allow
SSL upgrading over a clear-text connection.

If your mail provider has a dedicated SSL port you can use smtps:// instead of smtp://, which uses the SMTP
SSL port of 465 by default and requires the entire connection to be SSL. For example
smtps://smtp.gmail.com/.

However, if your provider allows upgrading from clear-text to secure transfers you can use one of these
options:

--ssl Try SSL/TLS (FTP, IMAP, POP3, SMTP)

--ssl-reqd Require SSL/TLS (FTP, IMAP, POP3, SMTP)

You can tell curl to try but not require upgrading to secure transfers by adding --ssl to the command:

curl --ssl smtp://mail.example.com --mail-from [email protected] \

--mail-rcpt [email protected] --upload-file email.txt \
--user '[email protected]:your-account-password'

You can tell curl to require upgrading to using secure transfers by adding --ssl-reqd to the command:

curl --ssl-reqd smtp://mail.example.com --mail-from [email protected] \

--mail-rcpt [email protected] --upload-file email.txt \
--user '[email protected]:your-account-password'

The SMTP URL

The path part of a SMTP request specifies the host name to present during communication with the mail
server. If the path is omitted then curl will attempt to figure out the local computer's host name and use that.
However, this may not return the fully qualified domain name that is required by some mail servers and
specifying this path allows you to set an alternative name, such as your machine's fully qualified domain
name, which you might have obtained from an external function such as gethostname or getaddrinfo.

To connect to the mail server at mail.example.com and send your local computer's host name in the
HELO / EHLO command:

curl smtp://mail.example.com

You can of course as always use the -v option to get to see the client-server communication.

To instead have curl send client.example.com in the HELO / EHLO command to the mail server at
mail.example.com , use:

curl smtp://mail.example.com/client.example.com
No MX lookup!
When you send email with an ordinary mail client, it will first check for an MX record for the particular domain
you want to send email to. If you send an email to [email protected] , the client will get the MX records
for example.com to learn which mail server(s) to use when sending email to example.com users.

curl does no MX lookups by itself. If you want to figure out which server to send an email to for a particular
domain, we recommend you figure that out first and then call curl to use those servers. Useful command line
tools to get MX records include 'dig' and 'nslookup'.

MQTT

A plain "GET" subscribes to the topic and prints all published messages. Doing a "POST" publishes the
post data to the topic and exits.

Subscribe to the temperature in the "home/bedroom" subject published by example.com:

curl mqtt://example.com/home/bedroom/temp

Send the value '75' to the "home/bedroom/dimmer" subject hosted by the example.com server:

curl -d 75 mqtt://example.com/home/bedroom/dimmer

What does curl deliver as a response to a subscribe

It outputs two bytes topic length (MSB | LSB), the topic followed by the payload.

Caveats
Remaining limitations in curl's MQTT support as of September 2020:

No username support
Only QoS level 0 is implemented for publish
No way to set retain flag for publish

No username/password support
No TLS (mqtts) support
TFTP

Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) is a simple clear-text protocol that allows a client to get a file from or put
a file onto a remote host.

Primary use cases for this protocol have been to get the boot image over a local network. TFTP also stands
out a little next to many other protocols by the fact that it is done over UDP as opposed to TCP which most
other protocols use.

There is no secure version or flavor of TFTP.

Download
Download a file from the TFTP server of choice:

curl -O tftp://localserver/file.boot

Upload

Upload a file to the TFTP server of choice:

curl -T file.boot tftp://localserver/

TFTP options
The TFTP protocols transmits data to the other end of the communication using "blocks". When a TFTP
transfer is setup, both parties either agree on using the default block size of 512 bytes or negotiate a different
one. curl supports block sizes between 8 to 65464 bytes.

You ask curl to use a different size than the default with --tftp-blksize . Ask for 8192 bytes blocks like
this:

curl --tftp-blksize 8192 tftp://localserver/file

It has been shown that there are server implementations that do not handle option negotiation at all, so curl
also has the ability to completely switch off all attempts of setting options. If you are in the unfortunate of
working with such a server, use the flag like this:
 curl --tftp-no-options tftp://localserver/file

TELNET

Telnet is an ancient application protocol for bidirectional clear-text communication. It was designed for
interactive text-oriented communications and there is no encrypted or secure version of Telnet.

TELNET is not a perfect match for curl. The protocol is not done to handle plain uploads or downloads so
the usual curl paradigms have had to be stretched somewhat to make curl deal with it appropriately.

curl sends received data to stdout and it reads input to send on stdin. The transfer is complete when the
connection is dropped or when the user presses control-c.

Historic TELNET
Once upon the time, systems provided telnet access for login. Then you could connect to a server and login
to it, much like how you would do it with SSH today. That practice have fortunately now mostly been moved
into the museum cabinets due to the insecure nature of the protocol.

The default port number for telnet is 23.

Debugging with TELNET

The fact that TELNET is basically just a simple clear-text TCP connection to the target host and port makes
it somewhat useful to debug other protocols and services at times.

Example, connect to your local HTTP server on port 80 and send a (broken) request to it by manually
entering GET / and press return twice:

curl telnet://localhost:80

Your web server will most probably return something like this back:

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request

Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2021 07:41:16 GMT
Server: softeare/7.8.9
Content-Length: 31
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

[message]
Options
When curl sets up a TELNET connection to a server, you can ask it to pass on options. You do this with --
telnet-option (or -t ), and there are three options available to use:

TTYPE=<term> sets the "terminal type" for the session to be <term> .

XDISPLOC=<X display> sets the X display location

NEW_ENV=<var,val> sets the environment variable var to the value val in the remote session

Login to your local machine's telnet server and tell it you use a vt100 terminal:

curl --telnet-option TTYPE=vt100 telnet://localhost

You need to manually enter your name and password when prompted.

DICT

DICT is a protocol for dictionary lookups.

Usage
For fun try

curl dict://dict.org/m:curl
curl dict://dict.org/d:heisenbug:jargon
curl dict://dict.org/d:daniel:gcide

Aliases for 'm' are 'match' and 'find', and aliases for 'd' are 'define' and 'lookup'. For example,

curl dict://dict.org/find:curl

Commands that break the URL description of the RFC (but not the DICT protocol) are

curl dict://dict.org/show:db
curl dict://dict.org/show:strat
TLS
TLS stands for Transport Layer Security and is the name for the technology that was formerly called SSL.
The term SSL has not really died though so these days both the terms TLS and SSL are often used
interchangeably to describe the same thing.

TLS is a cryptographic security layer "on top" of TCP that makes the data tamper proof and guarantees
server authenticity, based on strong public key cryptography and digital signatures.

Ciphers

Enable TLS

TLS versions

Verifying server certificates

Certificate pinning

OCSP stapling
Client certificates

TLS auth
TLS backends
SSLKEYLOGFILE

Ciphers

When curl connects to a TLS server, it negotiates how to speak the protocol and that negotiation involves
several parameters and variables that both parties need to agree to. One of the parameters is which
cryptography algorithms to use, the so called cipher. Over time, security researchers figure out flaws and
weaknesses in existing ciphers and they are gradually phased out over time.

Using the verbose option, -v , you can get information about which cipher and TLS version are negotiated.
By using the --ciphers option, you can change what cipher to prefer in the negotiation, but mind you,
this is a power feature that takes knowledge to know how to use in ways that do not just make things worse.

Enable TLS

curl supports the TLS version of many protocols. HTTP has HTTPS, FTP has FTPS, LDAP has LDAPS,
POP3 has POP3S, IMAP has IMAPS and SMTP has SMTPS.

If the server side supports it, you can use the TLS version of these protocols with curl.

There are two general approaches to do TLS with protocols. One of them is to speak TLS already from the
first connection handshake while the other is to "upgrade" the connection from plain-text to TLS using
protocol specific instructions.
With curl, if you explicitly specify the TLS version of the protocol (the one that has a name that ends with an
'S' character) in the URL, curl will try to connect with TLS from start, while if you specify the non-TLS version
in the URL you can usually upgrade the connection to TLS based with the ssl option
The support table looks like this:

Clear TLS version --ssl

HTTP HTTPS no

LDAP LDAPS no

FTP FTPS yes

POP3 POP3S yes

IMAP IMAPS yes

SMTP SMTPS yes

The protocols that can do --ssl all favor that method. Using --ssl means that curl will attempt to
upgrade the connection to TLS but if that fails, it will still continue with the transfer using the plain-text
version of the protocol. To make the --ssl option require TLS to continue, there is instead the --ssl-
reqd option which will make the transfer fail if curl cannot successfully negotiate TLS.

Require TLS security for your FTP transfer:

curl --ssl-reqd ftp://ftp.example.com/file.txt

Suggest TLS to be used for your FTP transfer:

curl --ssl ftp://ftp.example.com/file.txt

Connecting directly with TLS (to HTTPS://, LDAPS://, FTPS:// etc) means that TLS is mandatory and curl will
return an error if TLS is not negotiated.

Get a file over HTTPS:

curl https://www.example.com/

TLS versions

SSL was invented in the mid 90s and has developed ever since. SSL version 2 was the first widespread
version used on the Internet but that was deemed insecure already a long time ago. SSL version 3 took over
from there, and it too has been deemed not safe enough for use.

TLS version 1.0 was the first "standard". RFC 2246 was published 1999. TLS 1.1 came out in 2006, further
improving security, followed by TLS 1.2 in 2008. TLS 1.2 came to be the gold standard for TLS for a decade.

TLS 1.3 (RFC 8446) was finalized and published as a standard by the IETF in August 2018. This is the most
secure and fastest TLS version as of date. It is however so new that a lot of software, tools and libraries do
not yet support it.

curl is designed to use a "safe version" of SSL/TLS by default. It means that it will not negotiate SSLv2 or
SSLv3 unless specifically told to, and in fact several TLS libraries no longer provide support for those
protocols so in many cases curl is not even able to speak those protocol versions unless you make a
serious effort.

Option Use

--sslv2 SSL version 2

--sslv3 SSL version 3

--tlsv1 TLS >= version 1.0

--tlsv1.0 TLS >= version 1.0

--tlsv1.1 TLS >= version 1.1

--tlsv1.2 TLS >= version 1.2

--tlsv1.3 TLS >= version 1.3

Verifying server certificates

Having a secure connection to a server is not worth a lot if you cannot also be certain that you are
communicating with the correct host. If we do not know that, we could just as well be talking with an
impostor that just appears to be who we think it is.

To check that it communicates with the right TLS server, curl uses a set of locally stored CA certificates to
verify the signature of the server's certificate. All servers provide a certificate to the client as part of the TLS
handshake and all public TLS-using servers have acquired that certificate from an established Certificate
Authority.

After some applied crypto magic, curl knows that the server is in fact the correct one that acquired that
certificate for the host name that curl used to connect to it. Failing to verify the server's certificate is a TLS
handshake failure and curl exits with an error.

In rare circumstances, you may decide that you still want to communicate with a TLS server even if the
certificate verification fails. You then accept the fact that your communication may be subject to Man-In-The-
Middle attacks. You lower your guards with the -k or --insecure option.

CA store
curl needs a "CA store", a collection of CA certificates, to verify the TLS server it talks to.

If curl is built to use a TLS library that is "native" to your platform, chances are that library will use the native
CA store as well. If not, curl has to either have been built to know where the local CA store is, or users need
to provide a path to the CA store when curl is invoked.

You can point out a specific CA bundle to use in the TLS handshake with the --cacert command line
option. That bundle needs to be in PEM format. You can also set the environment variable
CURL_CA_BUNDLE to the full path.

CA store on windows

curl built on windows that is not using the native TLS library (Schannel), have an extra sequence for how the
CA store can be found and used.

curl will search for a CA cert file named "curl-ca-bundle.crt" in these directories and in this order:

1. application's directory
2. current working directory

3. Windows System directory (e.g. C:\windows\system32 )

4. Windows Directory (e.g. C:\windows )

5. all directories along %PATH%

Certificate pinning

TLS certificate pinning is a way to verify that the public key used to sign the servers certificate has not
changed. It is "pinned".

When negotiating a TLS or SSL connection, the server sends a certificate indicating its identity. A public key
is extracted from this certificate and if it does not exactly match the public key provided to this option, curl will
abort the connection before sending or receiving any data.

You tell curl a file name to read the sha256 value from, or you specify the base64 encoded hash directly in
the command line with a sha256// prefix. You can specify one or more hashes like that, separated with
semicolons (;).

curl --pinnedpubkey "sha256//83d34tasd3rt…" https://example.com/

This feature is not supported by all TLS backends.

OCSP stapling

This uses the TLS extension called Certificate Status Request to ask the server to provide a fresh "proof"
from the CA in the handshake, that the certificate that it returns is still valid. This is a way to make really sure
the server's certificate has not been revoked.
If the server does not support this extension, the test will fail and curl returns an error. And it is still far too
common that servers do not support this.

Ask for the handshake to use the status request like this:

curl --cert-status https://example.com/

This feature is only supported by the OpenSSL, GnuTLS and NSS backends.

Client certificates

TLS client certificates are a way for clients to cryptographically prove to servers that they are truly the right
peer (also sometimes known as Mutual TLS or mTLS). A command line that uses a client certificate
specifies the certificate and the corresponding key, and they are then passed on the TLS handshake with
the server.

You need to have your client certificate already stored in a file when doing this and you should supposedly
have gotten it from the right instance via a different channel previously.

The key is typically protected by a password that you need to provide or get prompted for interactively.

curl offers options to let you specify a single file that is both the client certificate and the private key
concatenated using --cert , or you can specify the key file independently with --key :

curl --cert mycert:mypassword https://example.com

curl --cert mycert:mypassword --key mykey https://example.com

For some TLS backends you can also pass in the key and certificate using different types:

curl --cert mycert:mypassword --cert-type PEM \

--key mykey --key-type PEM https://example.com

TLS auth

TLS connections offer a (rarely used) feature called Secure Remote Passwords. Using this, you
authenticate the connection for the server using a name and password and the command line flags for this
are --tlsuser <name> and --tlspassword <secret> . Like this:

curl --tlsuser daniel --tlspassword secret https://example.com

TLS backends

When curl is built, it gets told to use a specific TLS library. That TLS library is the engine that provides curl
with the powers to speak TLS over the wire. We often refer to them as different "backends" as they can be
seen as different pluggable pieces into the curl machine. curl can be built to be able to use one or more of
these backends.

Sometimes features and behaviors differ slightly when curl is built with different TLS backends, but the
developers work hard on making those differences as small and unnoticeable as possible.

Showing the curl version information with curl --version will always include the TLS library and version in
the first line of output.

Multiple TLS backends

When curl is built with multiple TLS backends, it can be told which one to use each time it is started. It is
always built to use a specific one by default unless one is asked for.

If you invoke curl --version for a curl with multiple backends it will mention MultiSSL as a feature
in the last line. The first line will then include all the supported TLS backends with the non-default ones
within parentheses.

To set a specific one to get used, set the environment variable CURL_SSL_BACKEND to its name.

SSLKEYLOGFILE
 view network traffic with Wireshark

Since a long time back, the venerable network analyzer tool Wireshark (screenshot above) has provided a
way to decrypt and inspect TLS traffic when sent and received by Firefox and Chrome.

This is similarly possible to do with curl.

You do this by making the browser or curl tell Wireshark the encryption secrets so that it can decrypt them:

1. set the environment variable named SSLKEYLOGFILE to a file name of your choice before you start
the browser or curl
2. Setting the same file name path in the Master-secret field in Wireshark. Go to Preferences->Protocols-
>TLS and edit the path as shown in the screenshot below.
 set the ssl key file name

Having done this simple operation, you can now inspect curl's or your browser's HTTPS traffic in Wireshark.
Just super handy and awesome.

Just remember that if you record TLS traffic and want to save it for analyzing later, you need to also save the
file with the secrets so that you can decrypt that traffic capture at a later time as well.

libcurl-using applications too!

Support for SSLKEYLOGFILE is provided by libcurl itself - making it possible for you to trace and inspect
the TLS network data for any application built to use libcurl - not just the curl command line tool.

Restrictions
The support for SSLKEYLOGFILE requires that curl was built with a TLS backend that supports this
feature. The backends that support SSLKEYLOGFILE are: OpenSSL, libressl, BoringSSL, GnuTLS, NSS
and wolfSSL.

If curl was built to use another backend, you cannot record your curl TLS traffic this way.

Copy as curl

Using curl to reproduce an operation a user just managed to do with his or her browser is a common request
and area people ask for help about.

How do you get a curl command line to get a resource, just like the browser would get it, nice and easy?
Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari all have this feature.

From Firefox
You get the site shown with Firefox's network tools. You then right-click on the specific request you want to
repeat in the "Web Developer->Network" tool when you see the HTTP traffic, and in the menu that appears
you select "Copy as cURL". Like this screenshot below shows. The operation then generates a curl
command line to your clipboard and you can then paste that into your favorite shell window. This feature is
available by default in all Firefox installations.
 copy as curl with Firefox

From Chrome and Edge

When you pop up the More tools->Developer mode in Chrome or Edge, and you select the Network tab you
see the HTTP traffic used to get the resources of the site. On the line of the specific resource you are
interested in, you right-click with the mouse and you select "Copy as cURL" and it will generate a command
line for you in your clipboard. Paste that in a shell to get a curl command line that makes the transfer. This
feature is available by default in all Chrome and Chromium installations.
 copy as curl with Chrome

From Safari
In Safari, the "development" menu is not visible until you go into preferences->Advanced and enable it.
But once you have done that, you can select Show web inspector in that development menu and get to see
a new console pop up that is similar to the development tools of Firefox and Chrome.

Select the network tab, reload the web page and then you can right click the particular resources that you
want to fetch with curl, as if you did it with Safari..
 copy as curl with Safari

On Firefox, without using the devtools

If this is something you would like to get done more often, you probably find using the developer tools a bit
inconvenient and cumbersome to pop up just to get the command line copied. Then cliget is the perfect add-
on for you as it gives you a new option in the right-click menu, so you can get a quick command line
generated really quickly, like this example when I right-click an image in Firefox:

cliget with Firefox

Not perfect
These methods all give you a command line to reproduce their HTTP transfers. You will also learn they are
still often not the perfect solution to your problems. Why? Well mostly because these tools are written to
rerun the exact same request that you copied, while you often want to rerun the same logic but not sending
an exact copy of the same cookies and file contents etc.

These tools will give you command lines with static and fixed cookie contents to send in the request,
because that is the contents of the cookies that were sent in the browser's requests. You will most likely
want to rewrite the command line to dynamically adapt to whatever the content is in the cookie that the
server told you in a previous response. And so on.

The copy as curl functionality is also often notoriously bad at using -F and instead they provide
handcrafted --data-binary solutions including the mime separator strings etc.

HTTP with curl

In all user surveys and during all curl's lifetime, HTTP has been the most important and most frequently used
protocol that curl supports. This chapter will explain how to do effective HTTP transfers and general fiddling
with curl.

This will mostly work the same way for HTTPS, as they are really the same thing under the hood, as HTTPS
is HTTP with an extra security TLS layer. See also the specific HTTPS section below.

HTTP methods
In every HTTP request, there is a method. Sometimes called a verb. The most commonly used ones are
GET, POST, HEAD and PUT.

Normally however you do not specify the method in the command line, but instead the exact method used
depends on the specific options you use. GET is default, using -d or -F makes it a POST, -I generates
a HEAD and -T sends a PUT.

More about this in the Modify the HTTP request section.

Protocol basics

(This assumes you have read the Network and protocols section or are otherwise already familiar with
protocols.)

HTTP is a protocol that is easy to learn the basics of. A client connects to a server—and it is always the
client that takes the initiative—sends a request and receives a response. Both the request and the response
consist of headers and a body. There can be little or a lot of information going in both directions.

An HTTP request sent by a client starts with a request line, followed by headers and then optionally a body.
The most common HTTP request is probably the GET request which asks the server to return a specific
resource, and this request does not contain a body.

When a client connects to 'example.com' and asks for the '/' resource, it sends a GET without a request
body:

GET / HTTP/1.1
User-agent: curl/2000
Host: example.com

…the server could respond with something like below, with response headers and a response body ('hello').
The first line in the response also contains the response code and the specific version the server supports:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: example-server/1.1
Content-Length: 5
Content-Type: plain/text

hello

If the client would instead send a request with a small request body ('hello'), it could look like this:

POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
User-agent: curl/2000
Content-Length: 5

hello

A server always responds to an HTTP request unless something is wrong.

The URL converted to a request

So when an HTTP client is given a URL to operate on, that URL is then used, picked apart and those parts
are used in various places in the outgoing request to the server. Let's take the an example URL:

https://www.example.com/path/to/file

https means that curl will use TLS to the remote port 443 (which is the default port number when no
specified is used in the URL).

www.example.com is the host name that curl will resolve to one or more IP address to connect to. This
host name will also be used in the HTTP request in the Host: header.
 /path/to/file is used in the HTTP request to tell the server which exact document/resources curl wants to
fetch

Responses

When an HTTP client talks HTTP to a server, the server will respond with an HTTP response message or
curl will consider it an error and returns 52 with the error message "Empty reply from server".

Size of an HTTP response

An HTTP response has a certain size and curl needs to figure it out. There are several different ways to
signal the end of an HTTP response but the most basic way is to use the Content-Length: header in
the response and with that specify the exact number of bytes in the response body.

Some early HTTP server implementations had problems with file sizes greater than 2GB and wrongly
managed to send Content-Length: headers with negative sizes or otherwise just plain wrong data. curl can
be told to ignore the Content-Length: header completely with --ignore-content-length . Doing so
may have some other negative side-effects but should at least let you get the data.

HTTP response codes

An HTTP transfer gets a 3 digit response code back in the first response line. The response code is the
server's way of giving the client a hint about how the request was handled.

It is important to note that curl does not consider it an error even if the response code would indicate that the
requested document could not be delivered (or similar). curl considers a successful sending and receiving of
HTTP to be good.

The first digit of the HTTP response code is a kind of "error class":

1xx: transient response, more is coming

2xx: success
3xx: a redirect
4xx: the client asked for something the server could not or would not deliver

5xx: there is a problem in the server

Remember that you can use curl's --write-out option to extract the response code. See the --write-out
section.

To make curl return an error for response codes >= 400, you need to use --fail or --fail-with-
body . Then curl will exit with error code 22 for such occurrences.
CONNECT response codes
Since there can be an HTTP request and a separate CONNECT request in the same curl transfer, we often
separate the CONNECT response (from the proxy) from the remote server's HTTP response.

The CONNECT is also an HTTP request so it gets response codes in the same numeric range and you can
use --write-out to extract that code as well.

Chunked transfer encoding

An HTTP 1.1 server can decide to respond with a "chunked" encoded response, a feature that was not
present in HTTP 1.0.

When receiving a chunked response, there is no Content-Length: for the response to indicate its size.
Instead, there is a Transfer-Encoding: chunked header that tells curl there is chunked data coming
and then in the response body, the data comes in a series of "chunks". Every individual chunk starts with the
size of that particular chunk (in hexadecimal), then a newline and then the contents of the chunk. This is
repeated over and over until the end of the response, which is signaled with a zero sized chunk. The point of
this response encoding is for the client to be able to figure out when the response has ended even though
the server did not know the full size before it started to send it. This is usually the case when the response is
dynamic and generated at the point when the request comes.

Clients like curl will, of course, decode the chunks and not show the chunk sizes to users.

Gzipped transfers
Responses over HTTP can be sent in compressed format. This is most commonly done by the server when
it includes a Content-Encoding: gzip in the response as a hint to the client. Compressed responses
make a lot of sense when either static resources are sent (that were compressed previously) or even in
runtime when there is more CPU power available than bandwidth. Sending a much smaller amount of data
is often preferred.

You can ask curl to both ask for compressed content and automatically and transparently uncompress
gzipped data when receiving content encoded gzip (or in fact any other compression algorithm that curl
understands) by using --compressed :

curl --compressed http://example.com/

Transfer encoding
A less common feature used with transfer encoding is compression.

Compression in itself is common. Over time the dominant and web compatible way to do compression for
HTTP has become to use Content-Encoding as described in the section above. But HTTP was
originally intended and specified to allow transparent compression as a transfer encoding, and curl supports
this feature.

The client then simply asks the server to do compression transfer encoding and if acceptable, it will respond
with a header indicating that it will and curl will then transparently uncompress that data on arrival. A user
enables asking for compressed transfer encoding with --tr-encoding :

curl --tr-encoding http://example.com/

It should be noted that not many HTTP servers in the wild support this.

Pass on transfer encoding

In some situations you may want to use curl as a proxy or other in-between software. In those cases, curl's
way to deal with transfer-encoding headers and then decoding the actual data transparently may not be
desired, if the end receiver also expects to do the same.

You can then ask curl to pass on the received data, without decoding it. That means passing on the sizes in
the chunked encoding format or the compressed format when compressed transfer encoding is used etc.

curl --raw http://example.com/

Authentication

Each HTTP request can be made authenticated. If a server or a proxy want the user to provide proof that
they have the correct credentials to access a URL or perform an action, it can send an HTTP response code
that informs the client that it needs to provide a correct HTTP authentication header in the request to be
allowed.

A server that requires authentication sends back a 401 response code and an associated WWW-
Authenticate: header that lists all the authentication methods that the server supports.

An HTTP proxy that requires authentication sends back a 407 response code and an associated Proxy-
Authenticate: header that lists all the authentication methods that the proxy supports.

It might be worth to note that most websites of today do not require HTTP authentication for login etc, but
they will instead ask users to login on web pages and then the browser will issue a POST with the user and
password etc, and then subsequently maintain cookies for the session.
To tell curl to do an authenticated HTTP request, you use the -u, --user option to provide user name
and password (separated with a colon). Like this:

curl --user daniel:secret http://example.com/

This will make curl use the default "Basic" HTTP authentication method. Yes, it is actually called Basic and
it is truly basic. To explicitly ask for the basic method, use --basic .

The Basic authentication method sends the user name and password in clear text over the network (base64
encoded) and should be avoided for HTTP transport.

When asking to do an HTTP transfer using a single (specified or implied), authentication method, curl will
insert the authentication header already in the first request on the wire.

If you would rather have curl first test if the authentication is really required, you can ask curl to figure that out
and then automatically use the most safe method it knows about with --anyauth . This makes curl try the
request unauthenticated, and then switch over to authentication if necessary:

curl --anyauth --user daniel:secret http://example.com/

and the same concept works for HTTP operations that may require authentication:

curl --proxy-anyauth --proxy-user daniel:secret http://example.com/ \

--proxy http://proxy.example.com:80/

curl typically (a little depending on how it was built) speaks several other authentication methods as well,
including Digest, Negotiate and NTLM. You can ask for those methods too specifically:

curl --digest --user daniel:secret http://example.com/

curl --negotiate --user daniel:secret http://example.com/
curl --ntlm --user daniel:secret http://example.com/

Ranges

What if the client only wants the first 200 bytes out of a remote resource or perhaps 300 bytes somewhere in
the middle? The HTTP protocol allows a client to ask for only a specific data range. The client asks the
server for the specific range with a start offset and an end offset. It can even combine things and ask for
several ranges in the same request by just listing a bunch of pieces next to each other. When a server sends
back multiple independent pieces to answer such a request, you will get them separated with mime
boundary strings and it will be up to the user application to handle that accordingly. curl will not further
separate such a response.

However, a byte range is only a request to the server. It does not have to respect the request and in many
cases, like when the server automatically generates the contents on the fly when it is being asked, it will
simply refuse to do it and it then instead responds with the full contents anyway.
You can make curl ask for a range with -r or --range . If you want the first 200 bytes out of something:

curl -r 0-199 http://example.com

Or everything in the file starting from index 200:

curl -r 200- http://example.com

Get 200 bytes from index 0 and 200 bytes from index 1000:

curl -r 0-199,1000-1199 http://example.com/

HTTP versions

As any other Internet protocol, the HTTP protocol has kept evolving over the years and now there are clients
and servers distributed over the world and over time that speak different versions with varying levels of
success. So in order to get libcurl to work with the URLs you pass in libcurl offers ways for you to specify
which HTTP version that request and transfer should use. libcurl is designed in a way so that it tries to use
the most common, the most sensible if you want, default values first but sometimes that is not enough and
then you may need to instruct libcurl on what to do.

curl defaults to HTTP/1.1 for HTTP servers but if you connect to HTTPS and you have a curl that has
HTTP/2 abilities built-in, it attempts to negotiate HTTP/2 automatically or falls back to 1.1 in case the
negotiation failed. Non-HTTP/2 capable curls get 1.1 over HTTPS by default.

Option Description

--http1.0 HTTP/1.0

--http1.1 HTTP/1.1

--http2 ​
HTTP/2 ​

--http2-prior-knowledge ​
HTTP/2 ​

--http3 ​
HTTP/3 ​

Accepting HTTP/0.9
The HTTP version used before HTTP/1.0 was made available is often referred to as HTTP/0.9. Back in
those days, HTTP responses had no headers as they would only return a response body and then
immediately close the connection.
curl can be told to support such responses but will by default not recognize them, for security reasons.
Almost anything bad will look like an HTTP/0.9 response to curl so the option needs to be used with caution.
The HTTP/0.9 option to curl is different than the other HTTP command line options for HTTP versions
mentioned above as this controls what response to accept, while the others are about what HTTP protocol
version to try to use.

Tell curl to accept an HTTP/0.9 response like this:

curl --http0.9 https://example.com/

Conditionals

Sometimes users want to avoid downloading a file again if the same file maybe already has been
downloaded the day before. This can be done by making the HTTP transfer "conditioned" on something.
curl supports two different conditions: the file timestamp and etag.

Check by modification date

Download the file only if it is newer than a specific date with the use of the -z or --time-cond option:

curl -z "Jan 10, 2017" https://example.com/file -O

Or the reverse, get the file only if it is older than the specific time by prefixing the date with a dash:

curl --time-cond "-Jan 10, 2017" https://example.com/file -O

The date parser is liberal and accepts most formats you can write the date with, and you can also specify it
complete with a time:

curl --time-cond "Sun, 12 Sep 2004 15:05:58 -0700" https://www.example.org/file.html

The -z option can also extract and use the timestamp from a local file, which is handy to only download a
file if it has been updated remotely:

curl -z file.html https://example.com/file.html -O

It is often useful to combine the use of -z with the --remote-time flag, which sets the time of the
locally created file to the same timestamp as the remote file had:

curl -z file.html -o file.html --remote-time https://example.com/file.html

Check by modification of content
HTTP servers can return a specific "ETag" for a given resource version. If the resource at a given URL
changes, a new Etag value must be generated, so a client knows that as long as the ETag remains the
same, the content has not changed.

Using ETags, curl can check for remote updates without having to rely on times or file dates. It also then
makes the check able to detect sub-second changes, which the timestamp based checks cannot.

Using curl you can download a remote file and save its ETag (if it provides any) in a separate "cache" by
using the --etag-save command line option. Like this:

curl --etag-save etags.txt https://example.com/file -o output

A subsequent command line can then use that previously saved etag and make sure to only download the
file again if it has changed, like this:

curl --etag-compare etag.txt https://example.com/file -o output

The two etag options can also be combined in the same command line, so that if the file actually was
updated, curl would save the update ETag again in the file:

curl --etag-compare etag.txt --etag-save etag.txt \

https://example.com/file -o output

HTTPS

HTTPS is in effect Secure HTTP. The "secure" part means that the TCP transport layer is enhanced to
provide authentication, privacy (encryption) and data integrity by the use of TLS.

See the Using TLS section for in-depth details on how to modify and tweak the TLS details in an HTTPS
transfer.

HTTP POST

POST is the HTTP method that was invented to send data to a receiving web application, and it is how most
common HTML forms on the web works. It usually sends a chunk of relatively small amounts of data to the
receiver.

This section describes the simple posts, for multipart formposts done with -F , check out Multipart
formposts
Simple POST
Content-Type

Posting binary

JSON

URL encoding

Convert to GET
Expect 100-continue

Chunked encoded POSTs

Hidden form fields

Figure out what a browser sends

JavaScript and forms

Simple POST

When the data is sent by a browser after data have been filled in a form, it will send it URL encoded, as a
serialized name=value pairs separated with ampersand symbols ( & ). You send such data with curl's -d or
--data option like this:

curl -d 'name=admin&shoesize=12' http://example.com/

When specifying multiple -d options on the command line, curl will concatenate them and insert
ampersands in between, so the above example could also be made like this:

curl -d name=admin -d shoesize=12 http://example.com/

If the amount of data to send is not really fit to put in a mere string on the command line, you can also read it
off a file name in standard curl style:

curl -d @filename http://example.com

While the server might assume that the data is encoded in some special way, curl does not encode or
change the data you tell it to send. curl sends exactly the bytes you give it.

To send a POST body that starts with a @ symbol, to avoid that curl tries to load that as a file name, use --
data-raw instead. This option has no file loading capability:

curl --data-raw '@string' https://example.com

Content-Type

POSTing with curl's -d option will make it include a default header that looks like Content-Type:
application/x-www-form-urlencoded . That is what your typical browser will use for a plain POST.

Many receivers of POST data do not care about or check the Content-Type header.

If that header is not good enough for you, you should, of course, replace that and instead provide the correct
one. Such as if you POST JSON to a server and want to more accurately tell the server about what the
content is:

curl -d '{json}' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' https://example.com

Posting binary

When reading data to post from a file, -d will strip out carriage return and newlines. Use --data-
binary if you want curl to read and use the given file in binary exactly as given:

curl --data-binary @filename http://example.com/

JSON

curl 7.82.0 introduced the --json option as a new way to send JSON formatted data to HTTP servers
using POST. This option works as a shortcut and provides a single option that replaces these three:

--data [arg]
--header "Content-Type: application/json"
--header "Accept: application/json"

This option does not make curl actually understand or know about the JSON data it sends, but it makes it
easier to send it. curl will not touch or parse the data that it sends, so you need to make sure it is valid JSON
yourself.

Send a basic JSON object to a server:

curl --json '{"tool": "curl"}' https://example.com/

Send JSON from a local file:

curl --json @json.txt https://example.com/

Send JSON passed to curl on stdin:

echo '{"a":"b"}' | curl --json @- https://example.com/

You can use multiple --json options on the same command line. This makes curl concatenate the
contents from the options and send all data in one go to the server. Note that the concatenation is plain text
based and will not in any way merge the JSON object as per JSON.

Send JSON from a file and concatenate a string to the end:

curl --json @json.txt --json ", "end": "true"}' https://example.com/

Crafting JSON to send

The quotes used in JSON data sometimes makes it a bit difficult and cumbersome to write and use in shells
and scripts.

Using a separate tool for this purpose might make things easier for you, and one tool in particular that might
help you accomplish this is jo.

Send a basic JSON object to a server with jo and --json

jo -p name=jo n=17 parser=false | curl --json @- https://example.com/

Receiving JSON
curl itself does not know or understand the contents it sends or receives, including when the server returns
JSON in its response.

Using a separate tool for the purpose of parsing or pretty-printing JSON responses might make things easier
for you, and one tool in particular that might help you accomplish this is jq.

Send a basic JSON object to a server, and pretty-print the JSON response:

curl --json '{"tool": "curl"}' https://example.com/ | jq

Send the JSON with jo , print the response with jq :

jo -p name=jo n=17 | curl --json @- https://example.com/ | jq

jq is a powerful and capable tool for extracting, filtering and managing JSON content that goes way beyond
just pretty-printing.
URL encoding

Percent-encoding, also known as URL encoding, is technically a mechanism for encoding data so that it can
appear in URLs. This encoding is typically used when sending POSTs with the application/x-www-
form-urlencoded content type, such as the ones curl sends with --data and --data-binary etc.

The command-line options mentioned above all require that you provide properly encoded data, data you
need to make sure already exists in the right format. While that gives you a lot of freedom, it is also a bit
inconvenient at times.

To help you send data you have not already encoded, curl offers the --data-urlencode option. This
option offers several different ways to URL encode the data you give it.

You use it like --data-urlencode data in the same style as the other --data options. To be CGI-
compliant, the data part should begin with a name followed by a separator and a content specification. The
data part can be passed to curl using one of the following syntaxes:

content : This will make curl URL encode the content and pass that on. Just be careful so that the
content does not contain any = or @ symbols, as that will then make the syntax match one of the other
cases below!

=content : This will make curl URL encode the content and pass that on. The initial '=' symbol is not
included in the data.

name=content : This will make curl URL encode the content part and pass that on. Note that the
name part is expected to be URL encoded already.

@filename : This will make curl load data from the given file (including any newlines), URL encode
that data and pass it on in the POST.

name@filename : This will make curl load data from the given file (including any newlines), URL
encode that data and pass it on in the POST. The name part gets an equal sign appended, resulting in
name=urlencoded-file-content. Note that the name is expected to be URL encoded already.

As an example, you could POST a name to have it encoded by curl:

curl --data-urlencode "name=John Doe (Junior)" http://example.com

…which would send the following data in the actual request body:

name=John%20Doe%20%28Junior%29

If you store the string John Doe (Junior) in a file named contents.txt , you can tell curl to send
that contents URL encoded using the field name 'user' like this:

curl --data-urlencode [email protected] http://example.com

In both these examples above, the field name is not URL encoded but is passed on as-is. If you want to URL
encode the field name as well, like if you want to pass on a field name called user name , you can ask
curl to encode the entire string by prefixing it with an equals sign (that will not get sent):

curl --data-urlencode "=user name=John Doe (Junior)" http://example.com

Convert to GET

A little convenience feature that could be suitable to mention in this context is the -G or --get option,
which takes all data you have specified with the different -d variants and appends that data to the inputted
URL e.g. http://example.com separated with a '?' and then makes curl send a GET instead.

This option makes it easy to switch between POSTing and GETing a form, for example.

An example that adds an encoded piece of data as a query in the URL:

curl -G --data-urlencode "name=daniel stenberg" https://example.com/

Expect 100-continue

HTTP/1 has no proper way to stop an ongoing transfer (in any direction) and still maintain the connection.
So, if we figure out that the transfer had better stop after the transfer has started, there are only two ways to
proceed: cut the connection and pay the price of reestablishing the connection again for the next request, or
keep the transfer going and waste bandwidth but be able to reuse the connection next time.

One example of when this can happen is when you send a large file over HTTP, only to discover that the
server requires authentication and immediately sends back a 401 response code.

The mitigation that exists to make this scenario less frequent is to have curl pass on an extra header,
Expect: 100-continue , which gives the server a chance to deny the request before a lot of data is
sent off. curl sends this Expect: header by default if the POST it will do is known or suspected to be larger
than just minuscule. curl also does this for PUT requests.

When a server gets a request with an 100-continue and deems the request fine, it will respond with a 100
response that makes the client continue. If the server does not like the request, it sends back response code
for the error it thinks it is.

Unfortunately, lots of servers in the world do not properly support the Expect: header or do not handle it
correctly, so curl will only wait 1000 milliseconds for that first response before it will continue anyway.

Those are 1000 wasted milliseconds. You can then remove the use of Expect: from the request and avoid
the waiting with -H :

curl -H Expect: -d "payload to send" http://example.com

In some situations, curl will inhibit the use of the Expect header if the content it is about to send is small (like
below one kilobyte), as having to waste such a small chunk of data is not considered much of a problem.

HTTP/2 and later

HTTP/2 and later versions of HTTP can stop an ongoing transfer without shutting down the connection,
which makes Expect: pointless.

Chunked encoded POSTs

When talking to an HTTP 1.1 server, you can tell curl to send the request body without a Content-
Length: header upfront that specifies exactly how big the POST is. By insisting on curl using chunked
Transfer-Encoding, curl will send the POST chunked piece by piece in a special style that also sends the
size for each such chunk as it goes along.

You send a chunked POST with curl like this:

curl -H "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" -d @file http://example.com

Caveats
This assumes that you know you do this against an HTTP/1.1 server. Before 1.1, there was no chunked
encoding, and after version 1.1 chunked encoding has been deprecated.

Hidden form fields

Sending a post with -d is the equivalent of what a browser does when an HTML form is filled in and
submitted.

Submitting such forms is a common operation with curl; effectively, to have curl fill in a web form in an
automated fashion.

If you want to submit a form with curl and make it look as if it has been done with a browser, it is important to
provide all the input fields from the form. A common method for web pages is to set a few hidden input fields
to the form and have them assigned values directly in the HTML. A successful form submission, of course,
also includes those fields and in order to do that automatically you may be forced to first download the
HTML page that holds the form, parse it, and extract the hidden field values so that you can send them off
with curl.
Figure out what a browser sends

A common shortcut is to simply fill in the form with your browser and submit it and check in the browser's
network development tools exactly what it sent.

A slightly different way is to save the HTML page containing the form, and then edit that HTML page to
redirect the 'action=' part of the form to your own server or a test server that just outputs exactly what it gets.
Completing that form submission will then show you exactly how a browser sends it.

A third option is, of course, to use a network capture tool such as Wireshark to check exactly what is sent
over the wire. If you are working with HTTPS, you cannot see form submissions in clear text on the wire but
instead you need to make sure you can have Wireshark extract your TLS private key from your browser. See
the Wireshark documentation for details on doing that.

JavaScript and forms

A common mitigation against automated agents or scripts using curl is to have the page with the HTML form
use JavaScript to set values of some input fields, usually one of the hidden ones. Often, there is some
JavaScript code that executes on page load or when the submit button is pressed which sets a magic value
that the server then can verify before it considers the submission to be valid.

You can usually work around that by just reading the JavaScript code and redoing that logic in your script.
Using the tricks in Figure out what a browser sends to check exactly what a browser sends is then also a
good help.

Multipart formposts

A multipart formpost is what an HTTP client sends when an HTML form is submitted with enctype set to
"multipart/form-data". It is an HTTP POST request sent with the request body specially formatted as a series
of "parts", separated with MIME boundaries.

An example piece of HTML would look like this:

<form action="submit.cgi" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">

Name: <input type="text" name="person"><br>
File: <input type="file" name="secret"><br>
<input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>

Which could look something like this in a web browser:

 a multipart form

A user can fill in text in the 'Name' field and by pressing the 'Browse' button a local file can be selected that
will be uploaded when 'Submit' is pressed.

Sending such a form with curl

With curl, you add each separate multipart with one -F (or --form ) flag and you then continue and add
one -F for every input field in the form that you want to send.

The above small example form has two parts, one named 'person' that is a plain text field and one named
'secret' that is a file.

Send your data to that form like this:

curl -F person=anonymous -F [email protected] http://example.com/submit.cgi

The HTTP this generates

The action specifies where the POST is sent. method says it is a POST and enctype tells us it is a
multipart formpost.

With the fields filled in as shown above, curl generates and sends these HTTP request headers to the host
example.com:

POST /submit.cgi HTTP/1.1

Host: example.com
User-Agent: curl/7.46.0
Accept: */*
Content-Length: 313
Expect: 100-continue
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=------------------------d74496d66958873e

Content-Length, of course, tells the server how much data to expect. This example's 313 bytes is really
small.
The Expect header is explained in the Expect 100 continue chapter.
The Content-Type header is a bit special. It tells that this is a multipart formpost and then it sets the
"boundary" string. The boundary string is a line of characters with a bunch of random digits somewhere in it,
that serves as a separator between the different parts of the form that will be submitted. The particular
boundary you see in this example has the random part d74496d66958873e but you will, of course, get
something different when you run curl (or when you submit such a form with a browser).

So after that initial set of headers follows the request body

--------------------------d74496d66958873e
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="person"

anonymous
--------------------------d74496d66958873e
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="secret"; filename="file.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain

contents of the file

--------------------------d74496d66958873e--

Here you clearly see the two parts sent, separated with the boundary strings. Each part starts with one or
more headers describing the individual part with its name and possibly some more details. Then after the
part's headers come the actual data of the part, without any sort of encoding.

The last boundary string has two extra dashes -- appended to signal the end.

Content-Type
POSTing with curl's -F option will make it include a default Content-Type header in its request, as shown in
the above example. This says multipart/form-data and then specifies the MIME boundary string.
That content-type is the default for multipart formposts but you can, of course, still modify that for your own
commands and if you do, curl is clever enough to still append the boundary magic to the replaced header.
You cannot really alter the boundary string, since curl needs that for producing the POST stream.

To replace the header, use -H like this:

curl -F 'name=Dan' -H 'Content-Type: multipart/magic' https://example.com

Converting a web form

There are a few different ways to figure out how to write a curl command line to submit a multipart form as
seen in HTML.

1
 1.
Save the HTML locally, run nc locally to listen on a chosen port number, change the action URL to
submit the POST to your local nc instance. Submit the form and watch how nc shows it. Then
translate into a curl command line.
2. Use the "development tools" in your favorite browser and inspect the POST request in the network tab
after you have submitted it. Then convert that HTTP data to a curl command line. Unfortunately, the copy
as curl feature in the browsers usually do not actually do multipart formposts particularly well.
3. Inspect the source HTML and convert into a curl command line directly from that.

From <form> to -F
In a <form> that uses enctype="multipart/form-data" , the first step is to find the action=
property as that tells the target for the POST. You need to convert that into a full URL for your curl command
line.

An example action looks like this:

<form action="submit.cgi" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">

If the form is found in a web page hosted on a URL like for example
https://example.com/user/login the action=submit.cgi is a relative path within the same
"directory" as the form itself. The full URL to submit this form thus becomes
https://example.com/user/submit.cgi . That is the URL to use in the curl command line.

Next, you must identify every <input> tag used within the form, including the ones that are marked as
"hidden". Hidden just means that they are not shown in the web page, but they should still be sent in the
POST.

For every <input> in the form there should be a corresponding -F in the command line.

text input

A regular tag using type "text" in the style like

<input type="text" name="person">

should then set the field name with content like this:

curl -F "person=Mr Smith" https://example.com/

file input

When the input type is set to a "file", like in:

<input type="file" name="image">

You provide a file for this part by specifying the file name and use @ and the path to the file to include:

curl -F [email protected] https://example.com/

hidden input

A common technique to pass on state from a form is to set a number of <input> tags as
type="hidden" . This is basically the same thing as an already filled in form field, so you convert this to a
command line by using the name and value. For example:

<input type="hidden" name="username" value="bob123">

This is converted like for the normal text field, and here you know what the content should be:

curl -F "username=bob123" https://example.com/

All fields at once

If we toy with the idea that all the three different <input> tags showed in the examples above were used
in the same <form> , then a complete curl command line to send, including the correct URL as extracted
above, would look like:

curl -F "person=Mr Smith" -F [email protected] -F "username=bob123" \

https://example.com/user/submit.cgi

-d vs -F

Previous chapters talked about regular POST and multipart formpost, and in your typical command lines you
do them with -d or -F .

When do you use which of them?

As described in the chapters mentioned above, both these options send the specified data to the server. The
difference is in how the data is formatted over the wire. Most of the time, the receiving end is written to
expect a specific format and it expects that the sender formats and sends the data correctly. A client cannot
just pick a format of its own choice.

HTML web forms

When we are talking browsers and HTML, the standard way is to offer a form to the user that sends off data
when the form has been filled in. The <form> tag is what makes one of those appear on the web page.
The tag instructs the browser how to format its POST. If the form tag includes
enctype=multipart/form-data , it tells the browser to send the data as a multipart formpost which
you make with curl's -F option. This method is typically used when the form includes a <input
type=file> tag for file uploads
The default enctype used by forms, which is rarely spelled out in HTML since it is default, is
application/x-www-form-urlencoded . It makes the browser "URL encode" the input as
name=value pairs with the data encoded to avoid unsafe characters. We often refer to that as a regular
POST, and you perform one with curl's -d and friends.

POST outside of HTML

POST is a regular HTTP method and there is no requirement that it be triggered by HTML or involve a
browser. Lots of services, APIs and other systems allow you to pass in data these days in order to get things
done.

If these services expect plain "raw" data or perhaps data formatted as JSON or similar, you want the regular
POST approach. curl's -d option does not alter or encode the data at all but will just send exactly what you
tell it to. Just pay attention that -d sets a default Content-Type: that might not be what you want.

Redirects

HTTP redirects
The “redirect” is a fundamental part of the HTTP protocol. The concept was present and is documented
already in the first spec (RFC 1945), published in 1996, and it has remained well-used ever since.

A redirect is exactly what it sounds like. It is the server sending back an instruction to the client instead of
giving back the contents the client wanted. The server says “go look over here instead for that thing you
asked for“.

Redirects are not all alike. How permanent is the redirect? What request method should the client use in the
next request?

All redirects also need to send back a Location: header with the new URI to ask for, which can be
absolute or relative.

Permanent and temporary

Is the redirect meant to last or just remain valid for now? If you want a GET to permanently redirect users to
resource B with another GET, send back a 301. It also means that the user-agent (browser) is meant to
cache this and keep going to the new URI from now on when the original URI is requested.

The temporary alternative is 302. Right now the server wants the client to send a GET request to B, but it
should not cache this but keep trying the original URI when directed to it next time.
Note that both 301 and 302 will make browsers do a GET in the next request, which possibly means
changing the method if it started with a POST (and only if POST). This changing of the HTTP method to
GET for 301 and 302 responses is said to be “for historical reasons”, but that’s still what browsers do so
most of the public web will behave this way.

In practice, the 303 code is similar to 302. It will not be cached and it will make the client issue a GET in the
next request. The differences between a 302 and 303 are subtle, but 303 seems to be more designed for an
“indirect response” to the original request rather than just a redirect.

These three codes were the only redirect codes in the HTTP/1.0 spec.

curl however, does not remember or cache any redirects at all so to it, there is really no difference between
permanent and temporary redirects.

Tell curl to follow redirects

In curl's tradition of only doing the basics unless you tell it differently, it does not follow HTTP redirects by
default. Use the -L, --location option to tell it to do that.

When following redirects is enabled, curl will follow up to 50 redirects by default. There is a maximum limit
mostly to avoid the risk of getting caught in endless loops. If 50 is not sufficient for you, you can change the
maximum number of redirects to follow with the --max-redirs option.

GET or POST?

All three of these response codes, 301 and 302/303, will assume that the client sends a GET to get the new
URI, even if the client might have sent a POST in the first request. This is important, at least if you do
something that does not use GET.

If the server instead wants to redirect the client to a new URI and wants it to send the same method in the
second request as it did in the first, like if it first sent POST it’d like it to send POST again in the next request,
the server would use different response codes.

To tell the client “the URI you sent a POST to, is permanently redirected to B where you should instead send
your POST now and in the future”, the server responds with a 308. And to complicate matters, the 308 code
is only recently defined (the spec was published in June 2014) so older clients may not treat it correctly! If
so, then the only response code left for you is…

The (older) response code to tell a client to send a POST also in the next request but temporarily is 307.
This redirect will not be cached by the client though, so it’ll again post to A if requested to again. The 307
code was introduced in HTTP/1.1.

Oh, and redirects work the same way in HTTP/2 as they do in HTTP/1.1.

Text Permanent Temporary

Switch to GET 301 302 and 303

Keep original method 308 307

Decide what method to use in redirects

It turns out that there are web services out there in the world that want a POST sent to the original URL, but
are responding with HTTP redirects that use a 301, 302 or 303 response codes and still want the HTTP
client to send the next request as a POST. As explained above, browsers won’t do that and neither will curl
—by default.

Since these setups exist, and they’re actually not terribly rare, curl offers options to alter its behavior.

You can tell curl to not change the non-GET request method to GET after a 30x response by using the
dedicated options for that: --post301 , --post302 and --post303 . If you are instead writing a
libcurl based application, you control that behavior with the CURLOPT_POSTREDIR option.

Redirecting to other host names

When you use curl you may provide credentials like user name and password for a particular site, but since
an HTTP redirect might move away to a different host curl limits what it sends away to other hosts than the
original within the same transfer.

So if you want the credentials to also get sent to the following host names even though they are not the
same as the original—presumably because you trust them and know that there is no harm in doing that—
you can tell curl that it is fine to do so by using the --location-trusted option.

Non-HTTP redirects
Browsers support more ways to do redirects that sometimes make life complicated to a curl user as these
methods are not supported or recognized by curl.

HTML redirects

If the above was not enough, the web world also provides a method to redirect browsers by plain HTML.
See the example <meta> tag below. This is somewhat complicated with curl since curl never parses
HTML and thus has no knowledge of these kinds of redirects.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://example.com/">

JavaScript redirects

The modern web is full of JavaScript and as you know, JavaScript is a language and a full runtime that
allows code to execute in the browser when visiting websites.

JavaScript also provides means for it to instruct the browser to move on to another site—a redirect, if you
will.

Modify the HTTP request

As described earlier, each HTTP transfer starts with curl sending an HTTP request. That request consists of
a request line and a number of request headers, and this chapter details how you can modify all of those.

Request method

Request target

Fragment

Customize headers

Referer
User-agent

Of course, changing the HTTP version is another way to alter the request.

Request method

The first line of an HTTP request includes the method - sometimes also referred to as the verb. When doing
a simple GET request as this command line would do:

curl http://example.com/file

…the initial request line looks like this:

GET /file HTTP/1.1

You can tell curl to change the method into something else by using the -X or --request command-line
options followed by the actual method name. You can, for example, send a DELETE instead of GET like
this:

curl http://example.com/file -X DELETE

This command-line option only changes the text in the outgoing request, it does not change any behavior.
This is particularly important if you, for example, ask curl to send a HEAD with -X , as HEAD is specified to
send all the headers a GET response would get but never send a response body, even if the headers
otherwise imply that one would come. So, adding -X HEAD to a command line that would otherwise do a
GET will cause curl to hang, waiting for a response body that will not come.

When asking curl to perform HTTP transfers, it will pick the correct method based on the option so you
should only rarely have to explicitly ask for it with -X . It should also be noted that when curl follows
redirects like asked to with -L , the request method set with -X will be sent even on the subsequent
redirects.
Request target
When given an input URL such as http://example.com/file , the path section of the URL gets
extracted and is turned into /file in the HTTP request line. That item in the protocol is called the request
target in HTTP. That is the resource this request will interact with. Normally this request target is extracted
from the URL and then used in the request and as a user you do not need to think about it.

In some rare circumstances, user may want to go creative and change this request target in ways that the
URL does not really allow. For example, the HTTP OPTIONS method has a specially define request target
for magic that concerns the server and not a specific path, and it uses * for that. Yes, a single asterisk.
There is no way to specify a URL for this, so if you want to pass a single asterisk in the request target to a
server, like for OPTIONS, you have to do it like this:

curl -X OPTIONS --request-target "*" http://example.com/

That example command line makes the first line of the outgoing HTTP request to look like this:

OPTIONS * HTTP/1.1

--path-as-is
The path part of the URL is the part that starts with the first slash after the host name and ends either at the
end of the URL or at a '?' or '#' (roughly speaking).

If you include substrings including /../ or /./ in the path, curl will automatically squash them before the
path is sent to the server, as is dictated by standards and how such strings tend to work in local file systems.
The /../ sequence will remove the previous section so that /hello/sir/../ ends up just /hello/
and /./ is simply removed so that /hello/./sir/ becomes /hello/sir/ .

To prevent curl from squashing those magic sequences before they are sent to the server and thus allow
them through, the --path-as-is option exists.

Lame attempt to trick the server to deliver its /etc/passwd file:

curl --path-as-is https://example.com/../../etc/passwd

Fragment

A URL may contain an "anchor", also known as a fragment, which is written with a pound sign and string at
the end of the URL. Like for example http://example.com/foo.html#here-it-is . That fragment
part, everything from the pound/hash sign to the end of the URL, is only intended for local use and will not
be sent over the network. curl will simply strip that data off and discard it.
Customize headers

In an HTTP request, after the initial request-line, there will typically follow a number of request headers. That
is a set of name: value pairs that ends with a blank line that separates the headers from the following
request body (that sometimes is empty).

curl will by default and on its own account pass a few headers in requests, like for example Host: ,
Accept: , User-Agent: and a few others that may depend on what the user asks curl to do.

All headers set by curl itself can be overridden, replaced if you will, by the user. You just then tell curl's -H
or --header the new header to use and it will then replace the internal one if the header field matches
one of those headers, or it will add the specified header to the list of headers to send in the request.

To change the Host: header, do this:

curl -H "Host: test.example" http://example.com/

To add a Elevator: floor-9 header, do this:

curl -H "Elevator: floor-9" http://example.com/

If you just want to delete an internally generated header, just give it to curl without a value, just nothing on
the right side of the colon.

To switch off the User-Agent: header, do this:

curl -H "User-Agent:" http://example.com/

Finally, if you then truly want to add a header with no contents on the right side of the colon (which is a rare
thing), the magic marker for that is to instead end the header field name with a semicolon. Like this:

curl -H "Empty;" http://example.com

Referer

When a user clicks on a link on a web page and the browser takes the user away to the next URL, it will
send the new URL a Referer: header in the new request telling it where it came from. That is the referer
header. The Referer: is misspelled but that is how it is supposed to be!

With curl you set the referer header with -e or --referer , like this:

curl --referer http://comes-from.example.com https://www.example.com/

User-agent

The User-Agent is a header that each client can set in the request to inform the server which user-agent it is.
Sometimes servers will look at this header and determine how to act based on its contents.

The default header value is 'curl/[version]', as in User-Agent: curl/7.54.1 for curl version 7.54.1.

You can set any value you like, using the option -A or --user-agent plus the string to use or, as it's just
a header, -H "User-Agent: foobar/2000" .

As comparison, a test version of Firefox on a Linux machine once sent this User-Agent header:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101

Firefox/58.0

HTTP PUT

The difference between a PUT and a POST is subtle. They are virtually identical transmissions except for
the different method strings. Where POST is meant to pass on data to a remote resource, PUT is supposed
to be the new version of that resource.

In that aspect, PUT is similar to good old standard file upload found in other protocols. You upload a new
version of the resource with PUT. The URL identifies the resource and you point out the local file to put
there:

curl -T localfile http://example.com/new/resource/file

…so -T will imply a PUT and tell curl which file to send off. But the similarities between POST and PUT also
allows you to send a PUT with a string by using the regular curl POST mechanism using -d but asking for
it to use a PUT instead:

curl -d "data to PUT" -X PUT http://example.com/new/resource/file

Cookies

HTTP cookies are key/value pairs that a client stores on the behalf of a server. They are sent back in
subsequent requests to allow clients to keep state between requests. Remember that the HTTP protocol
itself has no state but instead the client has to resend all data in subsequent requests that it wants the server
to be aware of.

Cookies are set by the server with the Set-Cookie: header and with each cookie the server sends a
bunch of extra properties that need to match for the client to send the cookie back. Like domain name and
path and perhaps most important for how long the cookie should live on.
The expiry of a cookie is either set to a fixed time in the future (or to live a number of seconds) or it gets no
expiry at all. A cookie without an expire time is called a "session cookie" and is meant to live during the
"session" but not longer. A session in this aspect is typically thought to be the life time of the browser used to
view a site. When you close the browser, you end your session. Doing HTTP operations with a command-
line client that supports cookies begs the question of when a session really ends…

Cookie engine
The general concept of curl only doing the bare minimum unless you tell it differently makes it not
acknowledge cookies by default. You need to switch on "the cookie engine" to make curl keep track of
cookies it receives and then subsequently send them out on requests that have matching cookies.

You enable the cookie engine by asking curl to read or write cookies. If you tell curl to read cookies from a
non-existing file, you will only switch on the engine but start off with an empty internal cookie store:

curl -b non-existing http://example.com

Just switching on the cookie engine, getting a single resource and then quitting would be pointless as curl
would have no chance to actually send any cookies it received. Assuming the site in this example would set
cookies and then do a redirect we would do:

curl -L -b non-existing http://example.com

Reading cookies from file

Starting off with a blank cookie store may not be desirable. Why not start off with cookies you stored in a
previous fetch or that you otherwise acquired? The file format curl uses for cookies is called the Netscape
cookie format because it was once the file format used by browsers and then you could easily tell curl to use
the browser's cookies!

As a convenience, curl also supports a cookie file being a set of HTTP headers that set cookies. It's an
inferior format but may be the only thing you have.

Tell curl which file to read the initial cookies from:

curl -L -b cookies.txt http://example.com

Remember that this only reads from the file. If the server would update the cookies in its response, curl
would update that cookie in its in-memory store but then eventually throw them all away when it exits and a
subsequent invocation of the same input file would use the original cookie contents again.
Writing cookies to file
The place where cookies are stored is sometimes referred to as the "cookie jar". When you enable the
cookie engine in curl and it has received cookies, you can instruct curl to write down all its known cookies to
a file, the cookie jar, before it exits. It is important to remember that curl only updates the output cookie jar on
exit and not during its lifetime, no matter how long the handling of the given input takes.

You point out the cookie jar output with -c :

curl -c cookie-jar.txt http://example.com

-c is the instruction to write cookies to a file, -b is the instruction to read cookies from a file. Oftentimes
you want both.

When curl writes cookies to this file, it will save all known cookies including those that are session cookies
(without a given lifetime). curl itself has no notion of a session and it does not know when a session ends so
it will not flush session cookies unless you tell it to.

New cookie session

Instead of telling curl when a session ends, curl features an option that lets the user decide when a new
session begins.

A new cookie session means that all the old session cookies will be thrown away. It is the equivalent of
closing a browser and starting it up again.

Tell curl a new cookie session starts by using -j, --junk-session-cookies :

curl -j -b cookies.txt http://example.com/

Cookie file format

Netscape once created a file format for storing cookies on disk so that they would survive browser restarts.
curl adopted that file format to allow sharing the cookies with browsers, only to soon watch the browsers
move away from that format. Modern browsers no longer use it, while curl still does.

The Netscape cookie file format stores one cookie per physical line in the file with a bunch of associated
meta data, each field separated with TAB. That file is called the cookiejar in curl terminology.

When libcurl saves a cookiejar, it creates a file header of its own in which there is a URL mention that will
link to the web version of this document.
File format
The cookie file format is text based and stores one cookie per line. Lines that start with # are treated as
comments.

Each line that specifies a single cookie consists of seven text fields separated with TAB characters (ASCII
octet 9). A valid line must end with a newline character.

Fields in the file

Field number, what type and example data and the meaning of it:

1. string example.com - the domain name

2. boolean FALSE - include subdomains

3. string /foobar/ - path

4. boolean TRUE - send/receive over HTTPS only

5. number 1462299217 - expires at - seconds since Jan 1st 1970, or 0

6. string person - name of the cookie

7. string daniel - value of the cookie

HTTP/2

curl supports HTTP/2 for both HTTP:// and HTTPS:// URLs assuming that curl was built with the proper
prerequisites. It will even default to using HTTP/2 when given an HTTPS URL since doing so implies no
penalty and when curl is used with sites that do not support HTTP/2 the request will instead negotiate
HTTP/1.1.

With HTTP:// URLs however, the upgrade to HTTP/2 is done with an Upgrade: header that may cause an
extra round-trip and perhaps even more troublesome, a sizable share of old servers will return a 400
response when seeing such a header.

It should also be noted that some (most?) servers that support HTTP/2 for HTTP:// (which in itself is not all
servers) will not acknowledge the Upgrade: header on POST, for example.

To ask a server to use HTTP/2, just:

curl --http2 http://example.com/

If your curl does not support HTTP/2, that command line will return an error saying so. Running curl -V
will show if your version of curl supports it.
If you by some chance already know that your server speaks HTTP/2 (for example, within your own
controlled environment where you know exactly what runs in your machines) you can shortcut the HTTP/2
"negotiation" with --http2-prior-knowledge .

Multiplexing
One of the primary features in the HTTP/2 protocol is the ability to multiplex several logical stream over the
same physical connection. When using the curl command-line tool, you cannot take advantage of that cool
feature since curl is doing all its network requests in a strictly serial manner, one after the next, with the
second only ever starting once the previous one has ended.

Preferably, a future curl version will be enhanced to allow the use of this feature.

Alternative Services

RFC 7838 defines an HTTP header which lets a server tell a client that there is one or more alternatives for
that server at "another place" with the use of the Alt-Svc: response header.

The alternatives the server suggests can include a server running on another port on the same host, on
another completely different host name and it can even perhaps offer the service over another protocol.

Enable
To make curl consider offered alternatives, tell curl to use a specific alt-svc cache file like this:

curl --alt-svc altcache.txt https://example.com/

then curl will load existing alternative service entries from the file at start-up and consider those when doing
HTTP requests, and if the servers sends new or updated Alt-Svc: headers, curl will store those in the
cache at exit.

The alt-svc cache

The alt-svc cache is similar to a cookie jar. It is a text based file that stores one alternative per line and each
entry also has an expiry time for which duration that particular alternative is valid.
HTTPS only
Alt-Svc: is only trusted and parsed from servers when connected to over HTTPS.

HTTP/3
The use of Alt-Svc: headers is as of August 2019 the only defined way to bootstrap a client and server
into using HTTP/3. The server then hints to the client over HTTP/1 or HTTP/2 that it also is available over
HTTP/3 and then curl can connect to it using HTTP/3 in the subsequent request if the alt-svc cache says so.

HTTP/3

This feature is marked experimental as of this time and needs to be explicitly enabled in the build to
function.

Drafts, not standard

As of January 2022, the HTTP/3 protocol has not yet been finalized. Everything and everyone that
speaks HTTP/3 at this point does it with the knowledge and awareness that it might change going forward.

QUIC
HTTP/3 is the HTTP version that is designed to communicate over QUIC. QUIC can for all particular
purposes to be considered as a TCP+TLS replacement.

All requests that do HTTP/3 will therefore not use TCP. They will use QUIC. QUIC is a reliable transport
protocol built over UDP. HTTP/3 implies use of QUIC.

HTTPS only
HTTP/3 is performed over QUIC which is always using TLS, so HTTP/3 is by definition always encrypted
and secure. Therefore, curl only uses HTTP/3 for HTTPS:// URLs.

Enable
As a shortcut straight to HTTP/3, to make curl attempt a QUIC connect directly to the given host name and
port number, use --http3 . Like this:

curl --http3 https://example.com/

Normally, without the --http3 option, an HTTPS:// URL implies that a client needs to connect to it
using TCP (and TLS).

Alt-svc:
The alt-svc method of changing to HTTP/3 is the official way to bootstrap into HTTP/3 for a server.

Note that you need that feature built-in and that it does not switch to HTTP/3 for the current request unless
the alt-svc cache is already populated, but it will rather store the info for use in the next request to the host.

When QUIC is denied

A certain amount of QUIC connection attempts will fail, partly because many networks and hosts block or
throttle the traffic.

Currently, curl features no fall-back logic but if an HTTP/3 (or QUIC rather) connection fails it will be reported
as, yes, a failure.

Web browsers will upgrade to HTTP/3 in the background and only switch over once they know it works,
which is a smoother way that does not break things for users as much.

Future curl versions will likely offer better fall-back and error handling for this.

HSTS

HTTP Strict Transport Security, HSTS, is a protocol mechanism that helps to protect HTTPS servers against
man-in-the-middle attacks such as protocol downgrade attacks and cookie hijacking. It allows an HTTPS
server to declare that clients should automatically interact with this host name using only HTTPS
connections going forward - and explicitly not use clear text protocols with it.

HSTS cache
The HSTS status for a certain server name is set in a response header and has an expire time. The status
for every HSTS host name needs to be saved in a file for curl to pick it up and to update the status and
expire time.

Invoke curl and tell it which file to use as a hsts cache:

 curl --hsts hsts.txt https://example.com

curl will only update the hsts info if the header is read over a secure transfer, so not when done over a clear
text protocol.

Use HSTS to update insecure protocols

If the cache file now contains an entry for the given host name, it will automatically switch over to a secure
protocol even if you try to connect to it with an insecure one:

curl --hsts hsts.txt http://example.com

HTTP cheat sheet

online here

Verbose Hide progress extra info Write output Timeout

-v -s -w "format" -O -m

--trace-ascii ​ ​ -o ​

POST multipart PUT HEAD custom

-d "string" -F name=value -T -I -X "METHOD"

-d @file -F name=@file ​ ​ ​

Basic auth read cookies write cookies send cookies user-agent

-u user:password -b -c -b "c=1; d=2" -A "string"

Headers,
Use proxy follow redirs gzip insecure
add/remove

-x -H "name: value" -L --compressed -k

-H "name:" ​ ​ ​

Scripting browser-like tasks

curl can do almost every HTTP operation and transfer your favorite browser can. It can actually do a lot more
than so as well, but in this chapter we will focus on the fact that you can use curl to reproduce, or script, what
you would otherwise have to do manually with a browser
Here are some tricks and advice on how to proceed when doing this.

Figure out what the browser does

This is really a necessary first step. Second-guessing what it does risks having you chase down the wrong
problem rat-hole. The scientific approach to this problem pretty much requires that you first understand what
the browser does.

To learn what the browser does to perform a certain task, you can either read the HTML pages that you
operate on and with a deep enough knowledge you can see what a browser would do to accomplish it and
then start trying to do the same with curl.

The slightly more effective way, that also works even for the cases when the page is shock-full of obfuscated
JavaScript, is to run the browser and monitor what HTTP operations it performs.

The Copy as curl section describes how you can record a browser's request and easily convert that to a curl
command line.

Those copied curl command lines are often not good enough though since they tend to copy exactly that
request, while you probably want to be a bad bit more dynamic so that you can reproduce the same
operation and not just resend the verbatim request.

Cookies
A lot of the web today works with a user name and password login prompt somewhere. In many cases you
even logged in a while ago with your browser but it has kept the state and keeps you logged in.

The logged-in state is almost always done by using cookies. A common operation would be to first login and
save the returned cookies in a file, and then let the site update the cookies in the subsequent command
lines when you traverse the site with curl.

Web logins and sessions

The site at https://example.com/ features a login prompt. The login on the web site is an HTML form to which
you send a HTTP POST to. Save the response cookies and the response (HTML) output.

Although the login page is visible (if you would use a browser) on https://example.com/, the HTML form tag
on that page informs you about which exact URL to send the POST to, using the action parameter.

In our imaginary case, the form tag looks like this:

 <form action="login.cgi" method="POST">
<input type="text" name="user">
<input type="password" name="secret">
<input type="hidden" name="id" value="bc76">
</form>

There are three fields of importance. text, secret and id. The last one, the id, is marked hidden which
means that it will not show up in the browser and it is not a field that a user fills in. It is generated by the site
itself, and for your curl login to succeed, you need extract that value and use that in your POST submission
together with the rest of the data.

Send correct contents to the fields to the correct destination URL:

curl -d user=daniel -d secret=qwerty -d id=bc76 https://example.com/login.cgi -o out

Many login pages even send you a session cookie already when presenting the login, and since you often
need to extract the hidden fields from the <form> tag anyway, you could do something like this first:

curl -c cookies https://example.com/ -o loginform

You would often need an HTML parser or some scripting language to extract the id field from there and then
you can proceed and login as mentioned above, but with the added cookie loading (I am splitting the line
into two lines to make it more readable):

curl -d user=daniel -d secret=qwerty -d id=bc76 https://example.com/login.cgi \

-b cookies -c cookies -o out

You can see that it uses both -b for reading cookies from the file and -c to store cookies again, for when
the server sends back updated cookies.

Always, always, add -v to the command lines when working out the details. See also the verbose section
for more details on that.

Redirects
It is common for servers to use redirects when responding to a login POST. It is so common I would probably
say it is rare that it is not solved with a redirect.

You then just need to remember that curl does not follow redirects automatically. You need to instruct it to do
this by adding the -L command line option. Adding that to the previous command line then makes the full
one look like:

curl -d user=daniel -d secret=qwerty -d id=bc76 https://example.com/login.cgi \

-b cookies -c cookies -L -o out
Post-login
In the above example command lines, we save the login response output in a file named 'out' and in your
script you should probably verify that it contains some text or something that confirms that the login is
successful.

Once successfully logged in, get the files or perform the HTTP operations you need and remember to keep
using both -b and -c on the command lines to use and update the cookies.

Referer
Some sites will check that the Referer: is actually identifying the legitimate parent URL when you
request something or when you login or similar. You can then inform the server from which URL you arrived
by using -e https://example.com/ etc. Appending that to the previous login attempt then makes it:

curl -d user=daniel -d secret=qwerty -d id=bc76 https://example.com/login.cgi \

-b cookies -c cookies -L -e "https://example.com/" -o out

TLS fingerprinting
Anti-bot detections nowadays use TLS fingerprinting to figure out whether a request is coming from a
browser. Curl's fingerprint can vary depending on your environment and most likely is different from those of
browsers. Curl's CLI does not have options to change all the various parts of the fingerprint, however an
advanced user can customize the fingerprint through the use of libcurl and by compiling curl from source
themselves.

FTP with curl

FTP, the File Transfer Protocol, is probably the oldest network protocol that curl supports—it was created in
the early 1970s. The official spec that still is the go-to documentation is RFC 959, from 1985, published well
over a decade before the first curl release.

FTP was created in a different era of the Internet and computers and as such it works a little bit differently
than most other protocols. These differences can often be ignored and things will just work, but they are also
important to know at times when things do not run as planned.

Ping-pong
The FTP protocol is a command and response protocol; the client sends a command and the server
responds. If you use curl's -v option you will get to see all the commands and responses during a transfer.

For an ordinary transfer, there are something like 5 to 8 commands necessary to send and as many
responses to wait for and read. Perhaps needlessly to say, if the server is in a remote location there will be a
lot of time waiting for the ping pong to go through before the actual file transfer can be set up and get started.
For small files, the initial commands can take longer time than the actual data transfer.

Transfer mode
When an FTP client is about to transfer data, it specifies to the server which "transfer mode" it would like the
upcoming transfer to use. The two transfer modes curl supports are 'ASCII' and 'BINARY'. Ascii is for text
and usually means that the server will send the files with converted newlines while binary means sending
the data unaltered and assuming the file is not text.

curl will default to binary transfer mode for FTP, and you ask for ascii mode instead with -B, --use-
ascii or by making sure the URL ends with ;type=A .

Authentication

FTP is one of the protocols you normally do not access without a user name and password. It just happens
that for systems that allow "anonymous" FTP access you can login with pretty much any name and
password you like. When curl is used on an FTP URL to do transfer without any given user name or
password, it uses the name anonymous with the password [email protected] .

If you want to provide another user name and password, you can pass them on to curl either with the -u, -
-user option or embed the info in the URL:

curl --user daniel:secret ftp://example.com/download

curl ftp://daniel:[email protected]/download

FTP Directory listing

You can list a remote FTP directory with curl by making sure the URL ends with a trailing slash. If the URL
ends with a slash, curl will presume that it is a directory you want to list. If it is not actually a directory, you
will most likely instead get an error.

curl ftp://ftp.example.com/directory/
With FTP there is no standard syntax for the directory output that is returned for this sort of command that
uses the standard FTP command LIST . The listing is usually humanly readable and perfectly
understandable but you will see that different servers will return the listing in slightly different ways.

One way to get just a listing of all the names in a directory and thus to avoid the special formatting of the
regular directory listings is to tell curl to --list-only (or just -l ). curl then issues the NLST FTP
command instead:

curl --list-only ftp://ftp.example.com/directory/

NLST has its own quirks though, as some FTP servers list only actual files in their response to NLST; they
do not include directories and symbolic links!

Uploading with FTP

To upload to an FTP server, you specify the entire target file path and name in the URL, and you specify the
local file name to upload with -T, --upload-file . Optionally, you end the target URL with a slash and
then the file component from the local path will be appended by curl and used as the remote file name.

Like:

curl -T localfile ftp://ftp.example.com/dir/path/remote-file

or to use the local file name as the remote name:

curl -T localfile ftp://ftp.example.com/dir/path/

curl also supports globbing in the -T argument so you can opt to easily upload a range or a series of files:

curl -T 'image[1-99].jpg' ftp://ftp.example.com/upload/

or

curl -T '{Huey,Dewey,Louie}.jpg' ftp://ftp.example.com/nephews/

Custom FTP commands

The FTP protocol offers a wide variety of different commands that allow the client to perform actions, other
than the plain file transfers that curl is focused on.

A curl user can pass on such extra (custom) commands to the server as a step in the file transfer sequence.
curl even offers to have those commands run at different points in the process

Quote
In the old days the standard old ftp client had a command called quote. It was used to send commands
verbatim to the server. curl uses the same name for virtually the same functionality: send the specified
command verbatim to the server. Actually one or more commands. -Q or --quote .

To know what commands that are available and possible to send to a server, you need to know a little about
the FTP protocol, and possibly read up a bit on RFC 959 on the details.

To send a simple NOOP to the server (which does nothing!) before the transfer starts, provide it to curl like
this:

curl -Q NOOP ftp://example.com/file

To instead send the same command immediately after the transfer, prefix the FTP command with a dash:

curl -Q -NOOP ftp://example.com/file

The third "position in time" that curl offers to send the commands, is after curl has changed the working
directory, just before the commands that kick off the transfer are sent. To send command then, prefix the
command with a '+' (plus).

A series of commands
You can in fact send commands in all three different times by using multiple -Q on the command line. You
can also send multiple commands in the same position by using more -Q options.

By default, if any of the given commands returns an error from the server, curl will stop its operations, abort
the transfer (if it happens before transfer has started) and not send any more of the custom commands.

Example, rename a file then do a transfer:

curl -Q "RNFR original" -Q "RNTO newname" ftp://example.com/newname

Fallible commands
You can opt to send individual quote commands that are allowed to fail, to get an error returned from the
server without causing everything to stop.
You make the command "fallible" by prefixing it with an asterisk ( * ). For example, send a delete ( DELE )
after a transfer and allow it to fail:

curl -Q "-*DELE file" ftp://example.com/moo

Two connections

FTP uses two TCP connections! The first connection is setup by the client when it connects to an FTP
server, and is called the control connection. As the initial connection, it gets to handle authentication and
changing to the correct directory on the remote server, etc. When the client then is ready to transfer a file, a
second TCP connection is established and the data is transferred over that.

This setting up of a second connection causes nuisances and headaches for several reasons.

Active connections
The client can opt to ask the server to connect to the client to set it up, a so-called "active" connection. This
is done with the PORT or EPRT commands. Allowing a remote host to connect back to a client on a port that
the client opens up requires that there is no firewall or other network appliance in between that refuses that
to go through and that is far from always the case. You ask for an active transfer using curl -P [arg]
(also known as --ftp-port in long form) and while the option allows you to specify exactly which
address to use, just setting the same as you come from is almost always the correct choice and you do that
with -P - , like this way to ask for a file:

curl -P - ftp://example.com/foobar.txt

You can also explicitly ask curl to not use EPRT (which is a slightly newer command than PORT) with the -
-no-eprt command-line option.

Passive connections
Curl defaults to asking for a "passive" connection, which means it sends a PASV or EPSV command to the
server and then the server opens up a new port for the second connection that then curl connects to.
Outgoing connections to a new port are generally easier and less restricted for end users and clients, but it
then requires that the network in the server's end allows it.

Passive connections are enabled by default, but if you have switched on active before, you can switch back
to passive with --ftp-pasv .

You can also explicitly ask curl not to use EPSV (which is a slightly newer command than PASV) with the -
-no-epsv command-line option.
Sometimes the server is running a funky setup so that when curl issues the PASV command and the server
responds with an IP address for curl to connect to, that address is wrong and then curl fails to setup the data
connection. For this (rare) situation, you can ask curl to ignore the IP address mentioned in the PASV
response ( --ftp-skip-pasv-ip ) and instead use the same IP address it has for the control connection
even for the second connection.

Firewall issues
Using either active or passive transfers, any existing firewalls in the network path pretty much have to have
stateful inspection of the FTP traffic to figure out the new port to open that up and accept it for the second
connection.

Directory traversing

When doing FTP commands to traverse the remote file system, there are a few different ways curl can
proceed to reach the target file, the file the user wants to transfer.

multicwd
curl can do one change directory (CWD) command for every individual directory down the file tree hierarchy.
If the full path is one/two/three/file.txt , that method means doing three CWD commands before
asking for the file.txt file to get transferred. This method thus creates quite a large number of
commands if the path is many levels deep. This method is mandated by an early spec (RFC 1738) and is
how curl acts by default:

curl --ftp-method multicwd ftp://example.com/one/two/three/file.txt

This then equals this FTP command/response sequence (simplified):

> CWD one

< 250 OK. Current directory is /one
> CWD two
< 250 OK. Current directory is /one/two
> CWD three
< 250 OK. Current directory is /one/two/three
> RETR file.txt
nocwd
The opposite to doing one CWD for each directory part is to not change the directory at all. This method
asks the server using the entire path at once and is thus fast. Occasionally servers have a problem with this
and it is not purely standards-compliant:

curl --ftp-method nocwd ftp://example.com/one/two/three/file.txt

This then equals this FTP command/response sequence (simplified):

> RETR one/two/three/file.txt

singlecwd
This is the in-between the other two FTP methods. This makes a single CWD command to the target
directory and then it asks for the given file:

curl --ftp-method singlecwd ftp://example.com/one/two/three/file.txt

This then equals this FTP command/response sequence (simplified):

> CWD one/two/three

< 250 OK. Current directory is /one/two/three
> RETR file.txt

FTPS

FTPS is FTP secure by TLS. It negotiates fully secured TLS connections where plain FTP uses clear text
unsafe connections.

There are two ways to do FTPS with curl. The implicit way and the explicit way. (These terms originate from
the FTPS RFC). Usually the server you work with dictates which of these methods you can and shall use
against it.

Implicit FTPS
The implicit way is when you use ftps:// in your URL. This makes curl connect to the host and do a TLS
handshake immediately, without doing anything in the clear. If no port number is specified in the URL, curl
will use port 990 for this. This is usually not how FTPS is done.
Explicit FTPS
The explicit way of doing FTPS is to keep using an ftp:// URL, but instruct curl to upgrade the
connection into a secure one using the STARTTLS FTP command.

You can tell curl to either attempt an upgrade and continue as usual if the upgrade fails with --ssl , or you
can force curl to either upgrade or fail the whole thing hard if the upgrade fails by using --ssl-reqd . We
strongly recommend using the latter, so that you can be sure that a secure transfer is done - if any.

Common FTPS problems

The single most common problem with FTPS comes from the fact that the FTP protocol (that FTP still mostly
uses) uses a separate connection setup for the data transfer. This connection is done to another port and
when FTP is done over clear text (non-FTPS), firewalls and network inspectors etc can figure out that this is
FTP in progress and they can adapt things and rules for the new connection.

When everything is encrypted, with FTPS, firewalls cannot see what is going on and no outside can
dynamically adapt network rules or permission based on this.

Using libcurl

The engine in the curl command-line tool is libcurl. libcurl is also the engine in thousands of tools, services
and applications out there today, performing their Internet data transfers.

C API
libcurl is a library of functions that are provided with a C API, for applications written in C. You can easily use
it from C++ too, with only a few considerations (see libcurl for C++ programmers). For other languages, there
exist "bindings" that work as intermediate layers between libcurl the library and corresponding functions for
the particular language you like.

Transfer oriented
We have designed libcurl to be transfer oriented usually without forcing users to be protocol experts or in
fact know much at all about networking or the protocols involved. You setup a transfer with as many details
and specific information as you can and want, and then you tell libcurl to perform that transfer.

That said, networking and protocols are areas with lots of pitfalls and special cases so the more you know
about these things, the more you will be able to understand about libcurl's options and ways of working. Not
to mention, such knowledge is invaluable when you are debugging and need to understand what to do next
when things do not go as you intended.

The most basic libcurl using application can be as small as just a couple of lines of code, but most
applications will, of course, need more code than that.

Simple by default, more on demand

libcurl generally does the simple and basic transfer by default, and if you want to add more advanced
features, you add that by setting the correct options. For example, libcurl does not support HTTP cookies by
default but it does once you tell it.

This makes libcurl's behaviors easier to guess and depend on, and also it makes it easier to maintain old
behavior and add new features. Only applications that actually ask for and use the new features will get that
behavior.

Header files

There is only ever one header your libcurl using application needs to include:

#include <curl/curl.h>

That file in turn includes a few other public header files but you can pretend they do not exist. (Historically
speaking, we started out slightly different but over time we have stabilized around this form of only using a
single one for includes.)

Easy handle

The fundamentals you need to learn with libcurl:

First you create an "easy handle", which is your handle to a transfer, really:

CURL *easy_handle = curl_easy_init();

You then set options in that handle to control the upcoming transfer. This example sets the URL:

/* set URL to operate on */

res = curl_easy_setopt(easy_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "http://example.com/");

If curl_easy_setopt() returns CURLE_OK , we know it stored the option fine.

Creating the easy handle and setting options on it does not make any transfer happen, and usually do not
even make much more happen other than libcurl storing your wish to be used later when the transfer
actually occurs. Lots of syntax checking and validation of the input may also be postponed, so just because
curl_easy_setopt did not complain, it does not mean that the input was correct and valid; you may get
an error returned later
Read more on easy options in its separate section.

When you are done setting options to your easy handle, you can fire off the actual transfer.

The actual performing of the transfer can be done using different methods and function calls, depending on
what kind of behavior you want in your application and how libcurl is best integrated into your architecture.
Those are further described later in this chapter.

While the transfer is ongoing, libcurl calls your specified functions—known as callbacks — to deliver data, to
read data and to do a variety of things.

After the transfer has completed, you can figure out if it succeeded or not and you can extract statistics and
other information that libcurl gathered during the transfer from the easy handle. See Post transfer
information.

Reuse
Easy handles are meant and designed to be reused. When you have done a single transfer with the easy
handle, you can immediately use it again for your next transfer. There are lots of gains to be had by this.

All options are "sticky". If you make a second transfer with the same handle, the same options are used.
They remain set in the handle until you change them again, or call curl_easy_reset() on the handle.

Reset
By calling curl_easy_reset() , all options for the given easy handle will be reset and restored to their
default values. The same values the options had when the handle was initially created. The caches remain
intact.

Duplicate
An easy handle, with all its currently set options, can be duplicated using curl_easy_duphandle() . It
returns a copy of the handle passed in to it.

The caches and other state information will not be carried over.
Drive transfers
libcurl provides three different ways to perform the transfer. Which way to use in your case is entirely up to
you and what you need.

1. The 'easy' interface lets you do a single transfer in a synchronous fashion. libcurl will do the entire
transfer and return control back to your application when it is completed—successful or failed.

2. The 'multi' interface is for when you want to do more than one transfer at the same time, or you just want
a non-blocking transfer.
3. The 'multi_socket' interface is a slight variation of the regular multi one, but is event-based and is really
the suggested API to use if you intend to scale up the number of simultaneous transfers to hundreds or
thousands or so.

Let's look at each one a little closer…

Drive with easy

The name 'easy' was picked simply because this is really the easy way to use libcurl, and with easy, of
course, comes a few limitations. Like, for example, that it can only do one transfer at a time and that it does
the entire transfer in a single function call and returns once it is completed:

res = curl_easy_perform( easy_handle );

If the server is slow, if the transfer is large or if you have some unpleasant timeouts in the network or similar,
this function call can end up taking a long time. You can, of course, set timeouts to not allow it to spend more
than N seconds, but it could still mean a substantial amount of time depending on the particular conditions.

If you want your application to do something else while libcurl is transferring with the easy interface, you
need to use multiple threads. If you want to do multiple simultaneous transfers when using the easy
interface, you need to perform each of the transfers in its own thread.

Drive with multi

The name 'multi' is for multiple, as in multiple parallel transfers, all done in the same single thread. The multi
API is non-blocking so it can also make sense to use it for single transfers.

The transfer is still set in an "easy" CURL * handle as described above, but with the multi interface you
also need a multi CURLM * handle created and use that to drive all the individual transfers. The multi
handle can "hold" one or many easy handles:

CURLM *multi_handle = curl_multi_init();

A multi handle can also get certain options set, which you do with curl_multi_setopt() , but in the
simplest case you might not have anything to set there.
To drive a multi interface transfer, you first need to add all the individual easy handles that should be
transferred to the multi handle. You can add them to the multi handle at any point and you can remove them
again whenever you like. Removing an easy handle from a multi handle will, of course, remove the
association and that particular transfer would stop immediately.

Adding an easy handle to the multi handle is easy:

curl_multi_add_handle( multi_handle, easy_handle );

Removing one is just as easily done:

curl_multi_remove_handle( multi_handle, easy_handle );

Having added the easy handles representing the transfers you want to perform, you write the transfer loop.
With the multi interface, you do the looping so you can ask libcurl for a set of file descriptors and a timeout
value and do the select() call yourself, or you can use the slightly simplified version which does that for
us, with curl_multi_wait . The simplest loop could look like this: (note that a real application would
check return codes)

int transfers_running;
do {
curl_multi_wait ( multi_handle, NULL, 0, 1000, NULL);
curl_multi_perform ( multi_handle, &transfers_running );
} while (transfers_running);

The fourth argument to curl_multi_wait , set to 1000 in the example above, is a timeout in
milliseconds. It is the longest time the function will wait for any activity before it returns anyway. You do not
want to lock up for too long before calling curl_multi_perform again as there are timeouts, progress
callbacks and more that may lose precision if you do so.

To instead do select() on our own, we extract the file descriptors and timeout value from libcurl like this (note
that a real application would check return codes):

int transfers_running;
do {
fd_set fdread;
fd_set fdwrite;
fd_set fdexcep;
int maxfd = -1;
long timeout;

/* extract timeout value */

curl_multi_timeout(multi_handle, &timeout);
if (timeout < 0)
timeout = 1000;

/* convert to struct usable by select */

 timeout.tv_sec = timeout / 1000;
timeout.tv_usec = (timeout % 1000) * 1000;

FD_ZERO(&fdread);

FD_ZERO(&fdwrite);
FD_ZERO(&fdexcep);

/* get file descriptors from the transfers */

mc = curl_multi_fdset(multi_handle, &fdread, &fdwrite, &fdexcep, &maxfd);

if (maxfd == -1) {
SHORT_SLEEP;
}
else
select(maxfd+1, &fdread, &fdwrite, &fdexcep, &timeout);

/* timeout or readable/writable sockets */

curl_multi_perform(multi_handle, &transfers_running);
} while ( transfers_running );

Both these loops let you use one or more file descriptors of your own on which to wait, like if you read from
your own sockets or a pipe or similar.

And again, you can add and remove easy handles to the multi handle at any point during the looping.
Removing a handle mid-transfer will, of course, abort that transfer.

When is a single transfer done?

As the examples above show, a program can detect when an individual transfer completes by seeing that
the transfers_running variable decreases.

It can also call curl_multi_info_read() , which will return a pointer to a struct (a "message") if a
transfer has ended and you can then find out the result of that transfer using that struct.

When you do multiple parallel transfers, more than one transfer can of course complete in the same
curl_multi_perform invocation and then you might need more than one call to
curl_multi_info_read to get info about each completed transfer.

Drive with multi_socket

multi_socket is the extra spicy version of the regular multi interface and is designed for event-driven
applications. Make sure you read the Drive with multi interface section first.

multi_socket supports multiple parallel transfers—all done in the same single thread—and have been used
to run several tens of thousands of transfers in a single application. It is usually the API that makes the most
sense if you do a large number (>100 or so) of parallel transfers.
Event-driven in this case means that your application uses a system level library or setup that "subscribes"
to a number of sockets and it lets your application know when one of those sockets are readable or writable
and it tells you exactly which one.

This setup allows clients to scale up the number of simultaneous transfers much higher than with other
systems, and still maintain good performance. The "regular" APIs otherwise waste far too much time
scanning through lists of all the sockets.

Pick one
There are numerous event based systems to select from out there, and libcurl is completely agnostic to
which one you use. libevent, libev and libuv are three popular ones but you can also go directly to your
operating system's native solutions such as epoll, kqueue, /dev/poll, pollset or Event Completion.

Many easy handles

Just like with the regular multi interface, you add easy handles to a multi handle with
curl_multi_add_handle() . One easy handle for each transfer you want to perform.

You can add them at any time while the transfers are running and you can also similarly remove easy
handles at any time using the curl_multi_remove_handle call. Typically though, you remove a
handle only after its transfer is completed.

multi_socket callbacks
As explained above, this event-based mechanism relies on the application to know which sockets are used
by libcurl and what libcurl waits for on those sockets: if it waits for the socket to become readable, writable or
both!

It also needs to tell libcurl when its timeout time has expired, as it is control of driving everything libcurl
cannot do it itself. So libcurl must tell the application an updated timeout value, too.

socket_callback

libcurl informs the application about socket activity to wait for with a callback called
CURLMOPT_SOCKETFUNCTION. Your application needs to implement such a function:

int socket_callback(CURL *easy, /* easy handle */

curl_socket_t s, /* socket */
int what, /* what to wait for */
void *userp, /* private callback pointer */
void *socketp) /* private socket pointer */
 { /* told about the socket 's' */
}

/* set the callback in the multi handle */

curl_multi_setopt(multi_handle, CURLMOPT_SOCKETFUNCTION, socket_callback);

Using this, libcurl will set and remove sockets your application should monitor. Your application tells the
underlying event-based system to wait for the sockets. This callback will be called multiple times if there are
multiple sockets to wait for, and it will be called again when the status changes and perhaps you should
switch from waiting for a writable socket to instead wait for it to become readable.

When one of the sockets that the application is monitoring on libcurl's behalf registers that it becomes
readable or writable, as requested, you tell libcurl about it by calling curl_multi_socket_action()
and passing in the affected socket and an associated bitmask specifying which socket activity that was
registered:

int running_handles;
ret = curl_multi_socket_action(multi_handle,
sockfd, /* the socket with activity */
ev_bitmask, /* the specific activity */
&running_handles);

timer_callback

The application is in control and will wait for socket activity. But even without socket activity there will be
things libcurl needs to do. Timeout things, calling the progress callback, starting over a retry or failing a
transfer that takes too long, etc. To make that work, the application must also make sure to handle a single-
shot timeout that libcurl sets.

libcurl sets the timeout with the timer_callback CURLMOPT_TIMERFUNCTION:

int timer_callback(multi_handle, /* multi handle */

timeout_ms, /* milliseconds to wait */
userp) /* private callback pointer */
{
/* the new time-out value to wait for is in 'timeout_ms' */
}

/* set the callback in the multi handle */

curl_multi_setopt(multi_handle, CURLMOPT_TIMERFUNCTION, timer_callback);

There is only one timeout for the application to handle for the entire multi handle, no matter how many
individual easy handles that have been added or transfers that are in progress. The timer callback will be
updated with the current nearest-in-time period to wait. If libcurl gets called before the timeout expiry time
because of socket activity, it may update the timeout value again before it expires.

When the event system of your choice eventually tells you that the timer has expired, you need to tell libcurl
about it:
 curl_multi_socket_action(multi, CURL_SOCKET_TIMEOUT, 0, &running);

…in many cases, this will make libcurl call the timer_callback again and set a new timeout for the next
expiry period.

How to start everything

When you have added one or more easy handles to the multi handle and set the socket and timer callbacks
in the multi handle, you are ready to start the transfer.

To kick it all off, you tell libcurl it timed out (because all easy handles start out with a short timeout) which will
make libcurl call the callbacks to set things up and from then on you can just let your event system drive:

/* all easy handles and callbacks are setup */

curl_multi_socket_action(multi, CURL_SOCKET_TIMEOUT, 0, &running);

/* now the callbacks should have been called and we have sockets to wait for
and possibly a timeout, too. Make the event system do its magic */

event_base_dispatch(event_base); /* libevent2 has this API */

/* at this point we have exited the event loop */

When is it done?

The 'running_handles' counter returned by curl_multi_socket_action holds the number of current

transfers not completed. When that number reaches zero, we know there are no transfers going on.

Each time the 'running_handles' counter changes, curl_multi_info_read() will return info about the
specific transfers that completed.

Connection reuse

libcurl keeps a pool of old connections alive. When one transfer has completed it will keep N connections
alive in a "connection pool" (sometimes also called connection cache) so that a subsequent transfer that
happens to be able to reuse one of the existing connections can use it instead of creating a new one.
Reusing a connection instead of creating a new one offers significant benefits in speed and required
resources.

When libcurl is about to make a new connection for the purposes of doing a transfer, it will first check to see
if there is an existing connection in the pool that it can reuse instead. The connection re-use check is done
before any DNS or other name resolving mechanism is used, so it is purely host name based. If there is an
existing live connection to the right host name, a lot of other properties (port number, protocol, etc) are also
checked to see that it can be used.
Easy API pool
When you are using the easy API, or, more specifically, curl_easy_perform() , libcurl will keep the
pool associated with the specific easy handle. Then reusing the same easy handle will ensure it can reuse
its connection.

Multi API pool

When you are using the multi API, the connection pool is instead kept associated with the multi handle. This
allows you to cleanup and re-create easy handles freely without risking losing the connection pool, and it
allows the connection used by one easy handle to get reused by a separate one in a later transfer. Just
reuse the multi handle!

Sharing the "connection cache"

Since libcurl 7.57.0, applications can use the share interface to have otherwise independent transfers share
the same connection pool.

Callbacks

Lots of operations within libcurl are controlled with the use of callbacks. A callback is a function pointer
provided to libcurl that libcurl then calls at some point to get a particular job done.

Each callback has its specific documented purpose and it requires that you write it with the exact function
prototype to accept the correct arguments and return the documented return code and return value so that
libcurl will perform the way you want it to.

Each callback option also has a companion option that sets the associated "user pointer". This user pointer
is a pointer that libcurl does not touch or care about, but just passes on as an argument to the callback. This
allows you to, for example, pass in pointers to local data all the way through to your callback function.

Unless explicitly stated in a libcurl function documentation, it is not legal to invoke libcurl functions from
within a libcurl callback.

Write data
Read data
Progress information

Header data
Debug
 sockopt
SSL context

Seek and ioctl

Network data conversion

Opensocket and closesocket

SSH key

RTSP interleaved data

FTP wildcard matching
Resolver start

Sending trailers
HSTS

Prereq

Write data

The write callback is set with CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION :

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, write_callback);

The write_callback function must match this prototype:

size_t write_callback(char *ptr, size_t size, size_t nmemb, void *userdata);

This callback function gets called by libcurl as soon as there is data received that needs to be saved. ptr
points to the delivered data, and the size of that data is size multiplied with nmemb.

If this callback is not set, libcurl instead uses 'fwrite' by default.

The write callback will be passed as much data as possible in all invokes, but it must not make any
assumptions. It may be one byte, it may be thousands. The maximum amount of body data that will be
passed to the write callback is defined in the curl.h header file: CURL_MAX_WRITE_SIZE (the usual
default is 16KB). If CURLOPT_HEADER is enabled for this transfer, which makes header data get passed to
the write callback, you can get up to CURL_MAX_HTTP_HEADER bytes of header data passed into it. This
usually means 100KB.

This function may be called with zero bytes data if the transferred file is empty.

The data passed to this function will not be zero terminated. You cannot, for example, use printf's %s
operator to display the contents nor strcpy to copy it.

This callback should return the number of bytes actually taken care of. If that number differs from the number
passed to your callback function, it will signal an error condition to the library. This will cause the transfer to
get aborted and the libcurl function used will return CURLE_WRITE_ERROR .
The user pointer passed in to the callback in the userdata argument is set with CURLOPT_WRITEDATA :

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_WRITEDATA, custom_pointer);

Store in memory
A popular demand is to store the retrieved response in memory, and the callback explained above supports
that. When doing this, just be careful as the response can potentially be enormous.

You implement the callback in a manner similar to:

struct response {
char *memory;
size_t size;
};

static size_t
mem_cb(void *contents, size_t size, size_t nmemb, void *userp)
{
size_t realsize = size * nmemb;
struct response *mem = (struct response *)userp;

char *ptr = realloc(mem->memory, mem->size + realsize + 1);

if(!ptr) {
/* out of memory! */
printf("not enough memory (realloc returned NULL)\n");
return 0;
}

mem->memory = ptr;
memcpy(&(mem->memory[mem->size]), contents, realsize);
mem->size += realsize;
mem->memory[mem->size] = 0;

return realsize;
}

int main()
{
struct response chunk = {.memory = malloc(0),
.size = 0};

/* send all data to this function */

curl_easy_setopt(curl_handle, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, mem_cb);

/* we pass our 'chunk' to the callback function */

curl_easy_setopt(curl_handle, CURLOPT_WRITEDATA, (void *)&chunk);
 free(chunk.memory);
}

Read data

The read callback is set with CURLOPT_READFUNCTION :

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_READFUNCTION, read_callback);

The read_callback function must match this prototype:

size_t read_callback(char *buffer, size_t size, size_t nitems, void *stream);

This callback function gets called by libcurl when it wants to send data to the server. This is a transfer that
you have set up to upload data or otherwise send it off to the server. This callback will be called over and
over until all data has been delivered or the transfer failed.

The stream pointer points to the private data set with CURLOPT_READDATA :

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_READDATA, custom_pointer);

If this callback is not set, libcurl instead uses 'fread' by default.

The data area pointed at by the pointer buffer should be filled up with at most size multiplied with nitems
number of bytes by your function. The callback should then return the number of bytes that it stored in that
memory area, or 0 if we have reached the end of the data. The callback can also return a few "magic" return
codes to cause libcurl to return failure immediately or to pause the particular transfer. See the
CURLOPT_READFUNCTION man page for details.

Progress information

The progress callback is what gets called regularly and repeatedly for each transfer during the entire lifetime
of the transfer. The old callback was set with CURLOPT_PROGRESSFUNCTION but the modern and
preferred callback is set with CURLOPT_XFERINFOFUNCTION :

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_XFERINFOFUNCTION, xfer_callback);

The xfer_callback function must match this prototype:

int xfer_callback(void *clientp, curl_off_t dltotal, curl_off_t dlnow,

curl_off_t ultotal, curl_off_t ulnow);
If this option is set and CURLOPT_NOPROGRESS is set to 0 (zero), this callback function gets called by
libcurl with a frequent interval. While data is being transferred it will be called frequently, and during slow
periods like when nothing is being transferred it can slow down to about one call per second.

The clientp pointer points to the private data set with CURLOPT_XFERINFODATA :

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_XFERINFODATA, custom_pointer);

The callback gets told how much data libcurl will transfer and has transferred, in number of bytes:

dltotal is the total number of bytes libcurl expects to download in this transfer.

dlnow is the number of bytes downloaded so far.

ultotal is the total number of bytes libcurl expects to upload in this transfer.

ulnow is the number of bytes uploaded so far.

Unknown/unused argument values passed to the callback will be set to zero (like if you only download data,
the upload size will remain 0). Many times the callback will be called one or more times first, before it knows
the data sizes, so a program must be made to handle that.

Returning a non-zero value from this callback will cause libcurl to abort the transfer and return
CURLE_ABORTED_BY_CALLBACK .

If you transfer data with the multi interface, this function will not be called during periods of idleness unless
you call the appropriate libcurl function that performs transfers.

(The deprecated callback CURLOPT_PROGRESSFUNCTION worked identically but instead of taking

arguments of type curl_off_t , it used double .)

Header data

The header callback is set with CURLOPT_HEADERFUNCTION :

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_HEADERFUNCTION, header_callback);

The header_callback function must match this prototype:

size_t header_callback(char *ptr, size_t size, size_t nmemb, void *userdata);

This callback function gets called by libcurl as soon as a header has been received. ptr points to the
delivered data, and the size of that data is size multiplied with nmemb. libcurl buffers headers and delivers
only "full" headers, one by one, to this callback.

The data passed to this function will not be zero terminated! You cannot, for example, use printf's %s
operator to display the contents nor strcpy to copy it.
This callback should return the number of bytes actually taken care of. If that number differs from the number
passed to your callback function, it signals an error condition to the library. This will cause the transfer to
abort and the libcurl function used will return CURLE_WRITE_ERROR .

The user pointer passed in to the callback in the userdata argument is set with CURLOPT_HEADERDATA :

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_HEADERDATA, custom_pointer);

Debug

The debug callback is set with CURLOPT_DEBUGFUNCTION :

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_DEBUGFUNCTION, debug_callback);

The debug_callback function must match this prototype:

int debug_callback(CURL *handle,

curl_infotype type,
char *data,
size_t size,
void *userdata);

This callback function replaces the default verbose output function in the library and will get called for all
debug and trace messages to aid applications to understand what's going on. The type argument explains
what sort of data that is provided: header, data or SSL data and in which direction it flows.

A common use for this callback is to get a full trace of all data that libcurl sends and receives. The data sent
to this callback is always the unencrypted version, even when, for example, HTTPS or other encrypted
protocols are used.

This callback must return zero or cause the transfer to stop with an error code.

The user pointer passed in to the callback in the userdata argument is set with CURLOPT_DEBUGDATA :

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_DEBUGDATA, custom_pointer);

sockopt

The sockopt callback is set with CURLOPT_SOCKOPTFUNCTION :

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_SOCKOPTFUNCTION, sockopt_callback);

The sockopt_callback function must match this prototype:

 int sockopt_callback(void *clientp,
curl_socket_t curlfd,
curlsocktype purpose);

This callback function gets called by libcurl when a new socket has been created but before the connect
call, to allow applications to change specific socket options.

The clientp pointer points to the private data set with CURLOPT_SOCKOPTDATA :

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_SOCKOPTDATA, custom_pointer);

This callback should return:

CURL_SOCKOPT_OK on success
CURL_SOCKOPT_ERROR to signal an unrecoverable error to libcurl
CURL_SOCKOPT_ALREADY_CONNECTED to signal success but also that the socket is in fact
already connected to the destination

SSL context

libcurl offers a special TLS related callback called CURLOPT_SSL_CTX_FUNCTION . This option only
works for libcurl powered by OpenSSL, wolfSSL or mbedTLS and it does nothing if libcurl is built with
another TLS backend.

This callback gets called by libcurl just before the initialization of a TLS connection after having processed
all other TLS related options to give a last chance to an application to modify the behavior of the TLS
initialization. The ssl_ctx parameter passed to the callback in the second argument is actually a
pointer to the SSL library's SSL_CTX for OpenSSL or wolfSSL, and a pointer to mbedtls_ssl_config
for mbedTLS. If an error is returned from the callback no attempt to establish a connection is made and the
operation will return the callback's error code. Set the userptr argument with the
CURLOPT_SSL_CTX_DATA option.

This function gets called on all new connections made to a server, during the TLS negotiation. The TLS
context will point to a newly initialized object each time.

Seek and ioctl

This callback is set with CURLOPT_SEEKFUNCTION .

The callback gets called by libcurl to seek to a certain position in the input stream and can be used to fast
forward a file in a resumed upload (instead of reading all uploaded bytes with the normal read
function/callback). It is also called to rewind a stream when data has already been sent to the server and
needs to be sent again. This may happen when doing an HTTP PUT or POST with a multi-pass
authentication method, or when an existing HTTP connection is reused too late and the server closes the
connection. The function shall work like fseek(3) or lseek(3) and it gets SEEK_SET , SEEK_CUR or
SEEK_END as argument for origin, although libcurl currently only passes SEEK_SET .

The custom userp sent to the callback is the pointer you set with CURLOPT_SEEKDATA .

The callback function must return CURL_SEEKFUNC_OK on success, CURL_SEEKFUNC_FAIL to cause

the upload operation to fail or CURL_SEEKFUNC_CANTSEEK to indicate that while the seek failed, libcurl is
free to work around the problem if possible. The latter can sometimes be done by instead reading from the
input or similar.

If you forward the input arguments directly to fseek(3) or lseek(3), note that the data type for offset is not the
same as defined for curl_off_t on many systems!

Network data conversion

Up until libcurl version 7.82.0, these callbacks were provided to make things work on non-ASCII platforms.
The support for these callbacks have since been removed.

The documentation below is kept here for a while and describes how they used to work. It will be removed
from this book at a future date.

Convert to and from network callbacks

For non-ASCII platforms, CURLOPT_CONV_FROM_NETWORK_FUNCTION is provided. This function should
convert to host encoding from the network encoding.

CURLOPT_CONV_TO_NETWORK_FUNCTION should convert from host encoding to the network encoding.

It is used when commands or ASCII data are sent over the network.

Convert from UTF-8 callback

CURLOPT_CONV_FROM_UTF8_FUNCTION should convert to host encoding from UTF-8 encoding. It is
required only for SSL processing.

Opensocket and closesocket

Occasionally you end up in a situation where you want your application to control with more precision
exactly what socket libcurl will use for its operations. libcurl offers this pair of callbacks that replaces libcurl's
own call to socket() and the subsequent close() of the same file descriptor.
Provide a file descriptor
By setting the CURLOPT_OPENSOCKETFUNCTION callback, you can provide a custom function to return a
file descriptor for libcurl to use:

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_OPENSOCKETFUNCTION, opensocket_callback);

The opensocket_callback function must match this prototype:

curl_socket_t opensocket_callback(void *clientp,

curlsocktype purpose,
struct curl_sockaddr *address);

The callback gets the clientp as first argument, which is simply an opaque pointer you set with
CURLOPT_OPENSOCKETDATA .

The other two arguments pass in data that identifies for what purpose and address the socket is to be used.
The purpose is a typedef with a value of CURLSOCKTYPE_IPCXN or CURLSOCKTYPE_ACCEPT ,
identifying in which circumstance the socket is created. The "accept" case being when libcurl is used to
accept an incoming FTP connection for when FTP active mode is used, and all other cases when libcurl
creates a socket for its own outgoing connections the IPCXN value is passed in.

The address pointer points to a struct curl_sockaddr that describes the IP address of the network
destination for which this socket is created. Your callback can for example use this information to whitelist or
blacklist specific addresses or address ranges.

The socketopen callback is also explicitly allowed to modify the target address in that struct, if you would
like to offer some sort of network filter or translation layer.

The callback should return a file descriptor or CURL_SOCKET_BAD , which then will cause an
unrecoverable error within libcurl and it will eventually return CURLE_COULDNT_CONNECT from its perform
function.

If you want to return a file descriptor that is already connected to a server, then you must also set the sockopt
callback and make sure that returns the correct return value.

The curl_sockaddress struct looks like this:

struct curl_sockaddr {
int family;
int socktype;
int protocol;
unsigned int addrlen;
struct sockaddr addr;
};
Socket close callback
The corresponding callback to the open socket is of course the close socket. Usually when you provide a
custom way to provide a file descriptor you want to provide your own cleanup version as well:

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_CLOSESOCKETFUNCTION, closesocket_callback);

The closesocket_callback function must match this prototype:

int closesocket_callback(void *clientp, curl_socket_t item);

SSH key

This callback is set with CURLOPT_SSH_KEYFUNCTION .

It gets called when the known_host matching has been done, to allow the application to act and decide
for libcurl how to proceed. The callback will only be called if CURLOPT_SSH_KNOWNHOSTS is also set.

In the arguments to the callback are the old key and the new key and the callback is expected to return a
return code that tells libcurl how to act:

CURLKHSTAT_FINE_REPLACE - The new host+key is accepted and libcurl will replace the old host+key
into the known_hosts file before continuing with the connection. This will also add the new host+key combo
to the known_host pool kept in memory if it was not already present there. The adding of data to the file is
done by completely replacing the file with a new copy, so the permissions of the file must allow this.

CURLKHSTAT_FINE_ADD_TO_FILE - The host+key is accepted and libcurl will append it to the

known_hosts file before continuing with the connection. This will also add the host+key combo to the
known_host pool kept in memory if it was not already present there. The adding of data to the file is done by
completely replacing the file with a new copy, so the permissions of the file must allow this.

CURLKHSTAT_FINE - The host+key is accepted libcurl will continue with the connection. This will also
add the host+key combo to the known_host pool kept in memory if it was not already present there.

CURLKHSTAT_REJECT - The host+key is rejected. libcurl will deny the connection to continue and it will
be closed.

CURLKHSTAT_DEFER - The host+key is rejected, but the SSH connection is asked to be kept alive. This
feature could be used when the app wants to somehow return and act on the host+key situation and then
retry without needing the overhead of setting it up from scratch again.

RTSP interleaved data

The callback with the CURLOPT_INTERLEAVEFUNCTION option.

This callback gets called by libcurl as soon as it has received interleaved RTP data when doing an RTSP
transfer. It gets called for each $ block and therefore contains exactly one upper-layer protocol unit (e.g.
one RTP packet). libcurl writes the interleaved header as well as the included data for each call. The first
byte is always an ASCII dollar sign. The dollar sign is followed by a one byte channel identifier and then a 2
byte integer length in network byte order. See RFC2326 Section 10.12 for more information on how RTP
interleaving behaves. If unset or set to NULL, curl will use the default write function.

The CURLOPT_INTERLEAVEDATA pointer is passed in the userdata argument in the callback.

FTP wildcard matching

libcurl supports FTP wildcard matching. You use this feature by setting CURLOPT_WILDCARDMATCH to
1L and then use a "wildcard pattern" in the in the file name part of the URL.

Wildcard patterns
The default libcurl wildcard matching function supports:

* - ASTERISK

ftp://example.com/some/path/*.txt

To match all txt files in the directory some/path . Only two asterisks are allowed within the same pattern
string.

? - QUESTION MARK"

A question mark matches any (exactly one) character. Like if you have files called photo1.jpeg and
photo7.jpeg this pattern could match them:

ftp://example.com/some/path/photo?.jpeg

[ - BRACKET EXPRESSION

The left bracket opens a bracket expression. The question mark and asterisk have no special meaning in a
bracket expression. Each bracket expression ends by the right bracket ( ] ) and matches exactly one
character. Some examples follow:

[a-zA-Z0-9] or [f-gF-G] - character intervals

[abc] - character enumeration

[^abc] or [!abc] - negation

[[:name:]] class expression. Supported classes are alnum, lower, space, alpha, digit, print, upper,
blank, graph, xdigit.

[][-!^] - special case, matches only \- , ] , [ , ! or ^ .

[\\[\\]\\\\] - escape syntax. Matches [ , ] or \\ .

Using the rules above, a file name pattern can be constructed:

ftp://example.com/some/path/[a-z[:upper:]\\\\].jpeg

FTP chunk callbacks

When FTP wildcard matching is used, the CURLOPT_CHUNK_BGN_FUNCTION callback is called before a
transfer is initiated for a file that matches.

The callback can then opt to return one of these return codes to tell libcurl what to do with the file:

CURL_CHUNK_BGN_FUNC_OK transfer the file

CURL_CHUNK_BGN_FUNC_SKIP

CURL_CHUNK_BGN_FUNC_FAIL stop because of error

After the matched file has been transferred or skipped, the CURLOPT_CHUNK_END_FUNCTION callback is
called.

The end chunk callback can only return success or error.

FTP matching callback

If the default pattern matching function is not to your liking, you can provide your own replacement function
by setting the CURLOPT_FNMATCH_FUNCTION option to your alternative.

Resolver start

This callback function, set with CURLOPT_RESOLVER_START_FUNCTION gets called by libcurl every
time before a new resolve request is started, and it specifies for which CURL * handle the resolve is
intended.

Sending trailers
"Trailers" is an HTTP/1 feature where headers can be passed on at the end of a transfer. This callback is
used for when you want to send trailers with curl after an upload has been performed. An upload in the form
of a chunked encoded POST.

The callback set with CURLOPT_TRAILERFUNCTION will be called and the function can then append
headers to a list. One or many. When done, libcurl sends off those as trailers to the server.

HSTS

For HSTS, HTTP Strict Transport Security, libcurl provides two callbacks to allow an allocation to implement
the storage for rules. The callbacks are then set to read and/or write the HSTS policies from a persistent
storage.

With CURLOPT_HSTSREADFUNCTION , the application provides a function using which HSTS data into
libcurl is read. CURLOPT_HSTSWRITEFUNCTION is the corresponding function that libcurl calls to write
data.

Prereq

"Prereq" here means immediately before the request is issued. That's the moment where this callback is
called.

Set the function with CURLOPT_PREREQFUNCTION and it will be called and pass on IP address and port
numbers in the arguments. This allows the application to know about the transfer just before it starts and
also allows it to cancel this particular transfer should it want to.

Cleanup

In previous sections we have discussed how to setup handles and how to drive the transfers. All transfers
will, of course, end up at some point, either successfully or with a failure.

Multi API
When you have finished a single transfer with the multi API, you use curl_multi_info_read() to
identify exactly which easy handle was completed and you remove that easy handle from the multi handle
with curl_multi_remove_handle() .

If you remove the last easy handle from the multi handle so there are no more transfers going on, you can
close the multi handle like this:

curl_multi_cleanup( multi_handle );
easy handle
When the easy handle is done serving its purpose, you can close it. If you intend to do another transfer, you
are however advised to rather reuse the handle rather than to close it and create a new one.

If you do not intend to do another transfer with the easy handle, you simply ask libcurl to cleanup:

curl_easy_cleanup( easy_handle );

Name resolving

Most transfers libcurl can do involves a name that first needs to be translated to an Internet address. That is
"name resolving". Using a numerical IP address directly in the URL usually avoids the name resolve phase,
but in many cases it is not easy to manually replace the name with the IP address.

libcurl tries hard to re-use an existing connection rather than to create a new one. The function that checks
for an existing connection to use is based purely on the name and is performed before any name resolving
is attempted. That is one of the reasons the re-use is so much faster. A transfer using a reused connection
will not resolve the host name again.

If no connection can be reused, libcurl resolves the host name to the set of addresses it resolves to.
Typically this means asking for both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and there may be a whole set of those
returned to libcurl. That set of addresses is then tried until one works, or it returns failure.

An application can force libcurl to use only an IPv4 or IPv6 resolved address by setting
CURLOPT_IPRESOLVE to the preferred value. For example, ask to only use IPv6 addresses:

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_IPRESOLVE, CURL_IPRESOLVE_V6);

Name resolver backends

libcurl can be built to do name resolves in one out of these three different ways and depending on which
backend way that is used, it gets a slightly different feature set and sometimes modified behavior.

1. The default backend is invoking the "normal" libc resolver functions in a new helper-thread, so that it
can still do fine-grained timeouts if wanted and there will be no blocking calls involved.

2. On older systems, libcurl uses the standard synchronous name resolver functions. They unfortunately
make all transfers within a multi handle block during its operation and it is much harder to time out
nicely.
3. There is also support for resolving with the c-ares third party library, which supports asynchronous name
 resolving without the use of threads. This scales better to huge number of parallel transfers but it is not
always 100% compatible with the native name resolver functionality.

DNS over HTTPS

Independently of what resolver backend that libcurl is built to use, since 7.62.0 it also provides a way for the
user to ask a specific DoH (DNS over HTTPS) server for the address of a name. This will avoid using the
normal, native resolver method and server and instead asks a dedicated separate one.

A DoH server is specified as a full URL with the CURLOPT_DOH_URL option like this:

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_DOH_URL, "https://example.com/doh");

The URL passed to this option must be using https:// and it is generally recommended that you have HTTP/2
support enabled so that libcurl can perform multiple DoH requests multiplexed over the connection to the
DoH server.

Caching
When a name has been resolved, the result will be put in libcurl's in-memory cache so that subsequent
resolves of the same name will be near instant for as long the name is kept in the DNS cache. By default,
each entry is kept in the cache for 60 seconds, but that value can be changed with
CURLOPT_DNS_CACHE_TIMEOUT .

The DNS cache is kept within the easy handle when curl_easy_perform is used, or within the multi
handle when the multi interface is used. It can also be made shared between multiple easy handles using
the share interface.

Custom addresses for hosts

Sometimes it is handy to provide "fake" addresses to real host names so that libcurl will connect to a
different address instead of one an actual name resolve would suggest.

With the help of the CURLOPT_RESOLVE option, an application can pre-populate libcurl's DNS cache with
a custom address for a given host name and port number.

To make libcurl connect to 127.0.0.1 when example.com on port 443 is requested, an application can do:

struct curl_slist *dns;

dns = curl_slist_append(NULL, "example.com:443:127.0.0.1");
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_RESOLVE, dns);

Since this puts the "fake" address into the DNS cache, it will work even when following redirects etc.
Name server options
For libcurl built to use c-ares, there is a few options available that offer fine-grained control of what DNS
servers to use and how. This is limited to c-ares build purely because these are powers that are not
available when the standard system calls for name resolving are used.

With CURLOPT_DNS_SERVERS , the application can select to use a set of dedicated DNS servers.

With CURLOPT_DNS_INTERFACE it can tell libcurl which network interface to speak DNS over instead
of the default one.

With CURLOPT_DNS_LOCAL_IP4 and CURLOPT_DNS_LOCAL_IP6 , the application can specify

which specific network addresses to bind DNS resolves to.

No global DNS cache

The option called CURLOPT_DNS_USE_GLOBAL_CACHE once told curl to use a global DNS cache. This
functionality has been removed since 7.65.0, so while this option still exists it does nothing.

Proxies

A proxy in a network context is a middle man, a server in between you as a client and the remote server you
want to communicate with. The client contacts the middle man which then goes on to contact the remote
server for you.

This style of proxy use is sometimes used by companies and organizations, in which case you are usually
required to use them to reach the target server.

There are several different kinds of proxies and different protocols to use when communicating with a proxy,
and libcurl supports a few of the most common proxy protocols. It is important to realize that the protocol
used to the proxy is not necessarily the same protocol used to the remote server.

When setting up a transfer with libcurl you need to point out the server name and port number of the proxy.
You may find that your favorite browsers can do this in slightly more advanced ways than libcurl can, and we
will get into such details in later sections.

Proxy types
libcurl supports the two major proxy types: SOCKS and HTTP proxies. More specifically, it supports both
SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 with or without remote name lookup, as well as both HTTP and HTTPS to the local
proxy.
The easiest way to specify which kind of proxy you are talking to is to set the scheme part of the proxy host
name string ( CURLOPT_PROXY ) to match it:

socks4://proxy.example.com:12345/
socks4a://proxy.example.com:12345/
socks5://proxy.example.com:12345/
socks5h://proxy.example.com:12345/

http://proxy.example.com:12345/
https://proxy.example.com:12345/

socks4 - means SOCKS4 with local name resolving

socks4a - means SOCKS4 with proxy's name resolving

socks5 - means SOCKS5 with local name resolving

socks5h - means SOCKS5 with proxy's name resolving

http - means HTTP, which always lets the proxy resolve names

https - means HTTPS to the proxy, which always lets the proxy resolve names (Note that HTTPS proxy
support was added recently, in curl 7.52.0, and it still only works with a subset of the TLS libraries:
OpenSSL, GnuTLS and NSS.)

You can also opt to set the type of the proxy with a separate option if you prefer to only set the host name,
using CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE . Similarly, you can set the proxy port number to use with
CURLOPT_PROXYPORT .

Local or proxy name lookup

In a section above you can see that different proxy setups allow the name resolving to be done by different
parties involved in the transfer. You can in several cases either have the client resolve the server host name
and pass on the IP address to the proxy to connect to - which of course assumes that the name lookup
works accurately on the client system - or you can hand over the name to the proxy to have the proxy resolve
the name; converting it to an IP address to connect to.

When you are using an HTTP or HTTPS proxy, you always give the name to the proxy to resolve.

Which proxy?
If your network connection requires the use of a proxy to reach the destination, you must figure this out and
tell libcurl to use the correct proxy. There is no support in libcurl to make it automatically figure out or detect a
proxy.

When using a browser, it is popular to provide the proxy with a PAC script or other means but none of those
are recognized by libcurl.
Proxy environment variables

If no proxy option has been set, libcurl will check for the existence of specially named environment variables
before it performs its transfer to see if a proxy is requested to get used.

You can specify the proxy by setting a variable named [scheme]_proxy to hold the proxy host name (the
same way you would specify the host with -x ). So if you want to tell curl to use a proxy when accessing an
HTTP server, you set the http_proxy environment variable. Like this:

http_proxy=http://proxy.example.com:80

The proxy example above is for HTTP, but can of course also set ftp_proxy , https_proxy , and so on
for the specific protocols you want to proxy. All these proxy environment variable names except http_proxy
can also be specified in uppercase, like HTTPS_PROXY .

To set a single variable that controls all protocols, the ALL_PROXY exists. If a specific protocol variable one
exists, such a one will take precedence.

When using environment variables to set a proxy, you could easily end up in a situation where one or a few
host names should be excluded from going through the proxy. This can be done with the NO_PROXY
variable - or the corresponding CURLOPT_NOPROXY libcurl option. Set that to a comma-separated list of
host names that should not use a proxy when being accessed. You can set NO_PROXY to be a single
asterisk ('*') to match all hosts.

HTTP proxy
The HTTP protocol details exactly how an HTTP proxy should be used. Instead of sending the request to
the actual remote server, the client (libcurl) instead asks the proxy for the specific resource. The connection
to the HTTP proxy is made using plain unencrypted HTTP.

If an HTTPS resource is requested, libcurl will instead issue a CONNECT request to the proxy. Such a
request opens a tunnel through the proxy, where it passes data through without understanding it. This way,
libcurl can establish a secure end-to-end TLS connection even when an HTTP proxy is present.

You can proxy non-HTTP protocols over an HTTP proxy, but since this is mostly done by the CONNECT
method to tunnel data through it requires that the proxy is configured to allow the client to connect to those
other particular remote port numbers. Many HTTP proxies are setup to inhibit connections to other port
numbers than 80 and 443.

HTTPS proxy
An HTTPS proxy is similar to an HTTP proxy but allows the client to connect to it using a secure HTTPS
connection. Since the proxy connection is separate from the connection to the remote site even in this
situation, as HTTPS to the remote site will be tunneled through the HTTPS connection to the proxy, libcurl
provides a whole set of TLS options for the proxy connection that are separate from the connection to the
remote host.
For example, CURLOPT_PROXY_CAINFO is the same functionality for the HTTPS proxy as
CURLOPT_CAINFO is for the remote host. CURLOPT_PROXY_SSL_VERIFYPEER is the proxy version of
CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER and so on.

HTTPS proxies are still today fairly unusual in organizations and companies.

Proxy authentication
Authentication with a proxy means that you need to provide valid credentials in the handshake negotiation
with the proxy itself. The proxy authentication is then in addition to and separate of the possible
authentication or lack of authentication with the remote host.

libcurl supports authentication with HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 proxies. The key option is then
CURLOPT_PROXYUSERPWD which sets the user name and password to use - unless you set it within the
CURLOPT_PROXY string.

HTTP Proxy headers

With an HTTP or HTTP proxy, libcurl will issue a request to the proxy that includes a set of headers. An
application can of course modify the headers, just like for requests sent to servers.

libcurl offers the CURLOPT_PROXYHEADER for controlling the headers that are sent to a proxy when there
is a separate request sent to the server. This typically means the initial CONNECT request sent to a proxy
for setting up a tunnel through the proxy.

Post transfer info

Remember how libcurl transfers are associated with an "easy handle"! Each transfer has such a handle and
when a transfer is completed, before the handle is cleaned or reused for another transfer, it can be used to
extract information from the previous operation.

Your friend for doing this is called curl_easy_getinfo() and you tell it which specific information you
are interested in and it will return that to you if it can.

When you use this function, you pass in the easy handle, which information you want and a pointer to a
variable to hold the answer. You must pass in a pointer to a variable of the correct type or you risk that things
will go side-ways. These information values are designed to be provided after the transfer is completed.

The data you receive can be a long, a 'char *', a 'struct curl_slist *', a double or a socket.
This is how you extract the Content-Type: value from the previous HTTP transfer:

CURLcode res;
char *content_type;
res = curl_easy_getinfo(curl, CURLINFO_CONTENT_TYPE, &content_type);

If you want to extract the local port number that was used in that connection:

CURLcode res;
long port_number;
res = curl_easy_getinfo(curl, CURLINFO_LOCAL_PORT, &port_number);

Available information

Getinfo option Type Description

CURLINFO_ACTIVESOCKET curl_socket_t The session's active socket

CURLINFO_APPCONNECT_TI Time from start until SSL/SSH

double
ME handshake completed

Time from start until SSL/SSH

CURLINFO_APPCONNECT_TI
curl_off_t handshake completed (in
ME_T
microseconds)

CURLINFO_CERTINFO struct curl_slist * Certificate chain

CURLINFO_CONDITION_UNM Whether or not a time

long
ET conditional was met

Time from start until remote hos

CURLINFO_CONNECT_TIME double
or proxy completed

Time from start until remote hos

CURLINFO_CONNECT_TIME_
curl_off_t or proxy completed (in
T
microseconds)

CURLINFO_CONTENT_LENG Content length from the Conten

double
TH_DOWNLOAD Length header

CURLINFO_CONTENT_LENG
double Upload size
TH_UPLOAD

Content type from the Content-

CURLINFO_CONTENT_TYPE char *
Type header

CURLINFO_COOKIELIST struct curl_slist * List of all known cookies

CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_MET
char * Last used HTTP request metho
HOD

CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL char * Last used URL

Remote time of the retrieved

CURLINFO_FILETIME long
document

CURLINFO_FTP_ENTRY_PAT The entry path after logging in t

char *
H an FTP server

Number of bytes of all headers

CURLINFO_HEADER_SIZE long
received

CURLINFO_HTTP_CONNECT Last proxy CONNECT respons

long
CODE code

The HTTP version used in the

CURLINFO_HTTP_VERSION long
connection

Available HTTP authentication

CURLINFO_HTTPAUTH_AVAIL long
methods (bitmask)

CURLINFO_LASTSOCKET long Last socket used

Local-end IP address of last

CURLINFO_LOCAL_IP char *
connection

CURLINFO_LOCAL_PORT long Local-end port of last connectio

CURLINFO_NAMELOOKUP_TI Time from start until name

double
ME resolving completed

Time from start until name

CURLINFO_NAMELOOKUP_TI
curl_off_t resolving completed (in
ME_T
microseconds)

Number of new successful

CURLINFO_NUM_CONNECTS long connections used for previous
transfer

The errno from the last failure to

CURLINFO_OS_ERRNO long
connect

CURLINFO_PRETRANSFER_ Time from start until just before

double
TIME the transfer begins

Time from start until just before

CURLINFO_PRETRANSFER_
curl_off_T the transfer begins (in
TIME_T
microseconds)

CURLINFO_PRIMARY_IP char * IP address of the last connectio

CURLINFO_PRIMARY_PORT long Port of the last connection
CURLINFO_PRIVATE char * User's private data pointer

The protocol used for the

CURLINFO_PROTOCOL long
connection

Detailed (SOCKS) proxy error

CURLINFO_PROXY_ERROR long CURLE_PROXY was returned
from the transfer

CURLINFO_PROXY_SSL_VER Proxy certificate verification

long
IFYRESULT result

CURLINFO_PROXYAUTH_AV Available HTTP proxy

long
AIL authentication methods

CURLINFO_REDIRECT_COU Total number of redirects that

long
NT were followed

Time taken for all redirect steps

CURLINFO_REDIRECT_TIME double
before the final transfer

Time taken for all redirect steps

CURLINFO_REDIRECT_TIME_
curl_off_t before the final transfer (in
T
microseconds)

URL a redirect would take you

CURLINFO_REDIRECT_URL char *
to, had you enabled redirects

Number of bytes sent in the

CURLINFO_REQUEST_SIZE long
issued HTTP requests

CURLINFO_RESPONSE_COD
long Last received response code
E

The value from the response

CURLINFO_RETRY_AFTER curl_off_t
Retry-After: header

CURLINFO_RTSP_CLIENT_C RTSP CSeq that will next be

long
SEQ used

CURLINFO_RTSP_CSEQ_RE
long RTSP CSeq last received
CV

CURLINFO_RTSP_SERVER_ RTSP CSeq that will next be

long
CSEQ expected

CURLINFO_RTSP_SESSION_I
char * RTSP session ID
D

The scheme used for the

CURLINFO_SCHEME char *
connection
 CURLINFO_SIZE_DOWNLOAD double Number of bytes downloaded

CURLINFO_SIZE_UPLOAD double Number of bytes uploaded

CURLINFO_SPEED_DOWNLO
double Average download speed
AD

CURLINFO_SPEED_UPLOAD double Average upload speed

A list of OpenSSL crypto

CURLINFO_SSL_ENGINES struct curl_slist *
engines

CURLINFO_SSL_VERIFYRES
long Certificate verification result
ULT

CURLINFO_STARTTRANSFE Time from start until just when

double
R_TIME the first byte is received

Time from start until just when

CURLINFO_STARTTRANSFE
curl_off_t the first byte is received (in
R_TIME_T
microseconds)

TLS session info that can be

CURLINFO_TLS_SSL_PTR struct curl_slist *
used for further processing

CURLINFO_TOTAL_TIME double Total time of previous transfer

Total time of previous transfer (

CURLINFO_TOTAL_TIME_T curl_off_t
microseconds)

Share data between handles

Sometimes applications need to share data between transfers. All easy handles added to the same multi
handle automatically get a lot of sharing done between the handles in that same multi handle, but
sometimes that is not exactly what you want.

Multi handle
All easy handles added to the same multi handle automatically share connection cache and dns cache.

Sharing between easy handles

libcurl has a generic "sharing interface", where the application creates a "share object" that then holds data
that can be shared by any number of easy handles. The data is then stored and read from the shared object
instead of kept within the handles that are sharing it

CURLSH *share = curl_share_init();

The shared object can be set to share all or any of cookies, connection cache, dns cache and SSL session
id cache.

For example, setting up the share to hold cookies and dns cache:

curl_share_setopt(share, CURLSHOPT_SHARE, CURL_LOCK_DATA_COOKIE);

curl_share_setopt(share, CURLSHOPT_SHARE, CURL_LOCK_DATA_DNS);

You then set up the corresponding transfer to use this share object:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_SHARE, share);

Transfers done with this curl handle will thus use and store its cookie and dns information in the share
handle. You can set several easy handles to share the same share object.

What to share
CURL_LOCK_DATA_COOKIE - set this bit to share cookie jar. Note that each easy handle still needs to get
its cookie "engine" started properly to start using cookies.

CURL_LOCK_DATA_DNS - the DNS cache is where libcurl stores addresses for resolved host names for a
while to make subsequent lookups faster.

CURL_LOCK_DATA_SSL_SESSION - the SSL session ID cache is where libcurl store resume information
for SSL connections to be able to resume a previous connection faster.

CURL_LOCK_DATA_CONNECT - when set, this handle will use a shared connection cache and thus will
probably be more likely to find existing connections to re-use etc, which may result in faster performance
when doing multiple transfers to the same host in a serial manner.

Locking
If you want have the share object shared by transfers in a multi-threaded environment. Perhaps you have a
CPU with many cores and you want each core to run its own thread and transfer data, but you still want the
different transfers to share data. Then you need to set the mutex callbacks.

If you do not use threading and you know you access the shared object in a serial one-at-a-time manner you
do not need to set any locks. But if there is ever more than one transfer that access share object at a time, it
needs to get mutex callbacks setup to prevent data destruction and possibly even crashes.

Since libcurl itself does not know how to lock things or even what threading model you are using, you must
make sure to do mutex locks that only allows one access at a time. A lock callback for a pthreads-using
application could look similar to:

static void lock_cb(CURL *handle, curl_lock_data data,

curl_lock_access access, void *userptr)
{
pthread_mutex_lock(&lock[data]); /* uses a global lock array */
}
curl_share_setopt(share, CURLSHOPT_LOCKFUNC, lock_cb);

With the corresponding unlock callback could look like:

static void unlock_cb(CURL *handle, curl_lock_data data,

void *userptr)
{
pthread_mutex_unlock(&lock[data]); /* uses a global lock array */
}
curl_share_setopt(share, CURLSHOPT_UNLOCKFUNC, unlock_cb);

Unshare
A transfer will use the share object during its transfer and share what that object has been specified to share
with other handles sharing the same object.

In a subsequent transfer, CURLOPT_SHARE can be set to NULL to prevent a transfer from continuing to
share. It that case, the handle may start the next transfer with empty caches for the data that was previously
shared.

Between two transfers, a share object can also get updated to share a different set of properties so that the
handles that share that object will share a different set of data next time. You remove an item to share from a
shared object with the curl_share_setopt()'s CURLSHOPT_UNSHARE option like this when unsharing DNS
data:

curl_share_setopt(share, CURLSHOPT_UNSHARE, CURL_LOCK_DATA_DNS);

URL API

libcurl offers an API for parsing, updating and generating URLs. Using this, applications can take advantage
of using libcurl's URL parser for its own purposes. By using the same parser, security problems due to
different interpretations can be avoided.

Include files
 Create, cleanup, duplicate
Parse a URL
Redirect to a relative URL
Get a URL

Get individual URL parts

Set individual URL parts

Append to the query

CURLOPT_CURLU

Include files

You include <curl/curl.h> in your code when you want to use the URL API.

#include <curl/curl.h>

CURLU *h = curl_url();
rc = curl_url_set(h, CURLUPART_URL, "ftp://example.com/no/where", 0);

Create, cleanup, duplicate

The first step when using this API is to create a CURLU * handle that holds URL info and resources. The
handle is a reference to an associated data object that holds information about a single URL and all its
different components.

The API allows you to set or get each URL component separately or as a full URL.

Create a URL handle like this:

CURLU *h = curl_url();

When you are done with it, clean it up:

curl_url_cleanup(h);

When you need a copy of a handle, just duplicate it:

CURLU *nh = curl_url_dup(h);

Parse a URL
You parse a full URL by setting the CURLUPART_URL part in the handle:

CURLU *h = curl_url();
rc = curl_url_set(h, CURLUPART_URL,
"https://example.com:449/foo/bar?name=moo", 0);

If successful, rc contains CURLUE_OK and the different URL components are held in the handle. It means
that the URL was valid as far as libcurl concerns.

The function call's forth argument is a bitmask. Set none, one or more bits in that to alter the parser's
behavior:

CURLU_NON_SUPPORT_SCHEME
Makes curl_url_set() accept a non-supported scheme. If not set, the only acceptable schemes are for
the protocols libcurl knows and have built-in support for.

CURLU_URLENCODE
Makes the function URL encode the path part if any bytes in it would benefit from that: like spaces or "control
characters".

CURLU_DEFAULT_SCHEME
If the passed in string does not use a scheme, assume that the default one was intended. The default
scheme is HTTPS. If this is not set, a URL without a scheme part will not be accepted as valid. Overrides the
CURLU_GUESS_SCHEME option if both are set.

CURLU_GUESS_SCHEME
Makes libcurl allow the URL to be set without a scheme and it instead "guesses" which scheme that was
intended based on the host name. If the outermost sub-domain name matches DICT, FTP, IMAP, LDAP,
POP3 or SMTP then that scheme will be used, otherwise it picks HTTP. Conflicts with the
CURLU_DEFAULT_SCHEME option which takes precedence if both are set.

CURLU_NO_AUTHORITY
Skips authority checks. The RFC allows individual schemes to omit the host part (normally the only
mandatory part of the authority), but libcurl cannot know whether this is permitted for custom schemes.
Specifying the flag permits empty authority sections, similar to how the file scheme is handled. Really only
usable in combination with CURLU_NON_SUPPORT_SCHEME .

CURLU_PATH_AS_IS
Makes libcurl skip the normalization of the path. That is the procedure where curl otherwise removes
sequences of dot-slash and dot-dot etc. The same option used for transfers is called
CURLOPT_PATH_AS_IS .

CURLU_ALLOW_SPACE
Makes the URL parser allow space (ASCII 32) where possible. The URL syntax does normally not allow
spaces anywhere, but they should be encoded as %20 or + . When spaces are allowed, they are still not
allowed in the scheme. When space is used and allowed in a URL, it will be stored as-is unless
CURLU_URLENCODE is also set, which then makes libcurl URL-encode the space before stored. This
affects how the URL will be constructed when curl_url_get() is subsequently used to extract the full
URL or individual parts.

Redirect to a relative URL

When the handle already has parsed a URL, setting a second relative URL will make it "redirect" to adapt to
it.

Example, first set the original URL then set the one we "redirect" to:

CURLU *h = curl_url();
rc = curl_url_set(h, CURLUPART_URL,
"https://example.com/foo/bar?name=moo", 0);

rc = curl_url_set(h, CURLUPART_URL, "../test?another", 0);

Get a URL

The CURLU * handle represents a single URL and you can easily extract that full URL or its individual
parts with curl_url_get :

char *url;
 rc = curl_url_get(h, CURLUPART_URL, &url, CURLU_NO_DEFAULT_PORT);
curl_free(url);

If the handle does not have enough information to return the part that is being asked for, it returns error.

A returned string must be freed with curl_free() after you are done with it.

The zero in the function call's forth argument is a flag bitmask for changing specific behaviors. Select from
the following bits:

CURLU_DEFAULT_PORT
If the URL handle has no port number stored, this option will make curl_url_get() return the default
port for the used scheme.

CURLU_DEFAULT_SCHEME
If the handle has no scheme stored, this option will make curl_url_get() return the default scheme
instead of error.

CURLU_NO_DEFAULT_PORT
Instructs curl_url_get() to not use a port number in the generated URL if that port number matches
the default port used for the scheme. For example, if port number 443 is set and the scheme is https , the
extracted URL will not include the port number.

CURLU_URLENCODE
If set, will make curl_url_get() URL encode the host name part when a full URL is retrieved. If not set
(default), libcurl returns the URL with the host name "raw" to support IDN names to appear as-is. IDN host
names are typically using non-ASCII bytes that otherwise will be percent-encoded.

Note that even when not asking for URL encoding, the % (byte 37) will be URL encoded in host names to
make sure the host name remains valid.

Get individual URL parts

The CURLU handle stores the individual parts of a URL and the application can extract those pieces
individually from the handle at any time If they are set
The second argument to curl_url_get() specifies which part you want extracted. They are all
extracted as null-terminated char * data, so you pass a pointer to such a variable.

char *host;
rc = curl_url_get(h, CURLUPART_HOST, &host, 0);

char *scheme;
rc = curl_url_get(h, CURLUPART_SCHEME, &scheme, 0);

char *user;
rc = curl_url_get(h, CURLUPART_USER, &user, 0);

char *password;
rc = curl_url_get(h, CURLUPART_PASSWORD, &password, 0);

char *port;
rc = curl_url_get(h, CURLUPART_PORT, &port, 0);

char *path;
rc = curl_url_get(h, CURLUPART_PATH, &path, 0);

char *query;
rc = curl_url_get(h, CURLUPART_QUERY, &query, 0);

char *fragment;
rc = curl_url_get(h, CURLUPART_FRAGMENT, &fragment, 0);

char *zoneid;
rc = curl_url_get(h, CURLUPART_ZONEID, &zoneid, 0);

Remember to free the returned string with curl_free when you are done with it!

Extracted parts are not URL decoded unless the user asks for it with the CURLU_URLDECODE flag.

URL parts
The different parts are named from their roles in the URL. Imagine a URL that looks like this:

http://joe:[email protected]:8080/images?id=5445#footer

When this URL is parsed by curl, it will store the different components like this:

text part

http CURLUPART_SCHEME
 joe CURLUPART_USER
7Hbz CURLUPART_PASSWORD

example.com CURLUPART_HOST

8080 CURLUPART_PORT

/images CURLUPART_PATH

id=5445 CURLUPART_QUERY

footer CURLUPART_FRAGMENT

Zone ID
The one thing that might stick out a little is the Zone id. It is an extra qualifier that can be used for IPv6
numerical addresses, and only for such addresses. It is used like this, where it is set to eth0 :

http://[2a04:4e42:e00::347%25eth0]/

For this URL, curl extracts:

text part

http CURLUPART_SCHEME

2a04:4e42:e00::347 CURLUPART_HOST

eth0 CURLUPART_ZONEID

/ CURLUPART_PATH

... and asking for any other component will then return non-zero as they are missing.

Set individual URL parts

The API allows the application to set individual parts of a URL held in the CURLU handle, either after
having parsed a full URL or instead of parsing such.

rc = curl_url_set(urlp, CURLUPART_HOST, "www.example.com", 0);

rc = curl_url_set(urlp, CURLUPART_SCHEME, "https", 0);
rc = curl_url_set(urlp, CURLUPART_USER, "john", 0);
rc = curl_url_set(urlp, CURLUPART_PASSWORD, "doe", 0);
 rc
rc =
= curl_url_set(urlp,
curl_url_set(urlp, CURLUPART_PORT,
CURLUPART_PATH, "443", 0);
"/index.html", 0);
rc = curl_url_set(urlp, CURLUPART_QUERY, "name=john", 0);
rc = curl_url_set(urlp, CURLUPART_FRAGMENT, "anchor", 0);
rc = curl_url_set(urlp, CURLUPART_ZONEID, "25", 0);

The API always expects a null-terminated char * string in the third argument, or NULL to clear the field.
Note that the port number is also provided as a string this way.

Set parts are not URL encoded unless the user asks for it with the CURLU_URLENCODE flag in the forth
argument.

Update parts
By setting an individual part, you can for example first set a full URL, then update a single component of that
URL and then extract the updated version of that URL.

For example, let's say we have this URL

const char *url="http://joe:[email protected]:8080/images?id=5445#footer";

and we want change the host in that URL to instead become example.net , it could be done like this:

CURLU *h = curl_url();
rc = curl_url_set(h, CURLUPART_URL, url, 0);

Then change the host name part:

rc = curl_url_set(h, CURLUPART_HOST, "example.net", 0);

and this then now holds this URL:

http://joe:[email protected]:8080/images?id=5445#footer

If you then continue and change the path part to /foo like this:

rc = curl_url_set(h, CURLUPART_PATH, "/foo", 0);

and the URL handle now holds this URL:

http://joe:[email protected]:8080/foo?id=5445#footer

etc...
Append to the query

An application can append a string to the right end of the existing query part with the
CURLU_APPENDQUERY flag.

Consider a handle that holds the URL https://example.com/?shoes=2 . An application can then
add the string hat=1 to the query part like this:

rc = curl_url_set(urlp, CURLUPART_QUERY, "hat=1", CURLU_APPENDQUERY);

It will even notice the lack of an ampersand ( & ) separator so it will inject one too, and the handle's full URL
would then equal https://example.com/?shoes=2&hat=1 .

The appended string can of course also get URL encoded on add, and if asked, the encoding will skip the '='
character. For example, append candy=M&M to what we already have, and URL encode it to deal with the
ampersand in the data:

rc = curl_url_set(urlp, CURLUPART_QUERY, "candy=M&M",

CURLU_APPENDQUERY | CURLU_URLENCODE);

Now the URL looks like https://example.com/?shoes=2&hat=1&candy=M%26M .

CURLOPT_CURLU

As a convenience to applications, they can pass in an already parsed URL to libcurl to work with, as an
alternative to CURLOPT_URL .

You pass in a CURLU handle instead of a URL string with the CURLOPT_CURLU option.

Example:

CURLU *h = curl_url();
rc = curl_url_set(h, CURLUPART_URL, "https://example.com/", 0);

CURL *easy = curl_easy_init();

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_CURLU, h);

WebSocket

WebSocket is a transfer protocol done on top of HTTP that offers a general purpose bidirectional byte-
stream. The protocol was created for more than just plain uploads and downloads and is more similar to
something like "TCP over HTTP".
A WebSocket client application sets up a connection with an HTTP request that upgrades into WebSocket -
and once upgraded, the involved parties speak WebSocket over that connection until it is done and the
connection is closed.

Support

URLs
Concept

Options
Read

Write

Support

WebSocket is an EXPERIMENTAL feature present in libcurl 7.86.0 and later. Since it is experimental, you
need to explicitly enable it in the build for it to be present and available.

To figure out if your libcurl installation supports WebSocket, you can call curl_version_info() and
check the ->protocols fields in the returned struct. It should contain ws for it to be present, and
probably also wss .

URLs

A client starts a WebSocket communication with libcurl by using a URL with the scheme ws or wss . Like
in wss://websocket.example.com/traffic-lights .

The wss variant is for using a TLS security connection, while the ws one is done over insecure clear text.

Concept

A libcurl application can do WebSocket using one of these two different approaches below.

1. The callback approach

It can decide to use the regular write callback to receive incoming data, and respond to that data in or
outside of the callback with curl_ws_send . Thereby treating the entire session as a form of download
from the server.

Within the write callback, an application can call curl_ws_meta() to retrieve information about the
incoming WebSocket data.
2. The connect-only approach
The other way to do it, if using the write callback is not suitable, is to set CURLOPT_CONNECT_ONLY to the
value 2L and let libcurl do a transfer that only sets up the connection to the server, does the WebSocket
upgrade and then is considered complete. After that connect-only transfer, the application can use
curl_ws_recv() and curl_ws_send() to receive and send WebSocket data over the connection.

Upgrade or die
Doing a transfer with a ws:// or wss:// URL implies that libcurl makes a successful upgrade to the
WebSocket protocol or an error is returned. An HTTP 200 response code which for example is considered
fine in a normal HTTP transfer is therefor considered an error when asking for a WebSocket transfer.

Automatic PONG
If not using raw mode, libcurl will automatically respond with the appropriate PONG response for incoming
PING frames and not expose them in the API.

Options

There is a dedicated setopt option for the application to control a WebSocket communication:
CURLOPT_WS_OPTIONS .

This option sets a bitmask of "flags" to libcurl, but at the moment, there is only a single bit used.

Raw mode
By setting the CURLWS_RAW_MODE bit in the bitmask, libcurl will deliver all WebSocket traffic "raw" to the
write callback instead of parsing the WebSocket traffic itself. This raw mode is intended for applications that
maybe implemented WebSocket handling already and want to just move over to use libcurl for the transfer
and maintain its own WebSocket logic.

In raw mode, libcurl will also not handle any PING traffic automatically.

Read
An application receives and reads incoming WebSocket traffic using one of these two methods:

Write callback
When the CURLOPT_CONNECT_ONLY option is not set, WebSocket data will be delivered to the write
callback.

In the default "frame mode" (as opposed to "raw mode"), libcurl delivers complete WebSocket frames to the
callback one by one as they arrive. The application can then call curl_ws_meta() to get information
about the specific frame that was passed to the callback.

curl_ws_recv
If the connect-only option was set, the transfer ends after the WebSocket has been setup to the remote host
and from that point the application needs to call curl_ws_recv() to read WebSocket data and
curl_ws_send() to send it.

The curl_ws_recv function has this prototype:

CURLcode curl_ws_recv(CURL *curl, void *buffer, size_t buflen,

size_t *recv, unsigned int *recvflags);

curl - the handle to the transfer

buffer - pointer to a buffer to receive the WebSocket data in

buflen - the size in bytes of the buffer

recv - the size in bytes of the data stored in the *buffer on return

recvflags - a bitmask of bits that describe the received frame. See the bit descriptions below.

CURLWS_TEXT

The buffer contains text data. Note that this makes a difference to WebSocket but libcurl itself will not make
any verification of the content or precautions that you actually receive valid UTF-8 content.

CURLWS_BINARY

This is binary data.

CURLWS_FINAL

This is the final fragment of the message, if this is not set, it implies that there will be another fragment
coming as part of the same message.
CURLWS_CLOSE

This transfer is now closed.

CURLWS_PING

This as an incoming ping message, that expects a pong response.

Write

An application can receive WebSocket data two different ways, but there is only one way for it to send off
data over the connection. The curl_ws_send() function.

curl_ws_send()

CURLcode curl_ws_send(CURL *curl, const void *buffer, size_t buflen,

size_t *sent, unsigned int sendflags);

curl - transfer handle

buffer - pointer to the frame data to send

buflen - length of the data (in bytes) in buffer

sent - number of bytes that were sent

sendflags - bitmask describing the data. See bit descriptions below.

CURLWS_TEXT

The buffer contains text data. Note that this makes a difference to WebSocket but libcurl itself will not make
any verification of the content or precautions that you actually send valid UTF-8 content.

CURLWS_BINARY

This is binary data.

CURLWS_CONT

This is not the final fragment of the message, which implies that there will be another fragment coming as
part of the same message where this bit is not set.

CURLWS_CLOSE
Close this transfer.

CURLWS_PING

This as a ping.

CURLWS_PONG

This as a pong.

API compatibility

libcurl promises API stability and guarantees that your program written today will remain working in the
future. We do not break compatibility.

Over time, we add features, new options and new functions to the APIs but we do not change behavior in a
non-compatible way or remove functions.

The last time we changed the API in an non-compatible way was for 7.16.0 in 2006 and we plan to never do
it again.

Version numbers
Curl and libcurl are individually versioned, but they mostly follow each other rather closely.

The version numbering is always built up using the same system:

X.Y.Z

X is main version number

Y is release number
Z is patch number

Bumping numbers
One of these X.Y.Z numbers will get bumped in every new release. The numbers to the right of a bumped
number will be reset to zero.

The main version number X is bumped when really big, world colliding changes are made. The release
number Y is bumped when changes are performed or things/features are added. The patch number Z is
bumped when the changes are mere bugfixes.
It means that after a release 1.2.3, we can release 2.0.0 if something really big has been made, 1.3.0 if not
that big changes were made or 1.2.4 if mostly bugs were fixed.
Bumping, as in increasing the number with 1, is unconditionally only affecting one of the numbers (and the
ones to the right of it are set to zero). 1 becomes 2, 3 becomes 4, 9 becomes 10, 88 becomes 89 and 99
becomes 100. So, after 1.2.9 comes 1.2.10. After 3.99.3, 3.100.0 might come.

All original curl source release archives are named according to the libcurl version (not according to the curl
client version that, as said before, might differ).

Which libcurl version

As a service to any application that might want to support new libcurl features while still being able to build
with older versions, all releases have the libcurl version stored in the curl/curlver.h file using a static
numbering scheme that can be used for comparison. The version number is defined as:

#define LIBCURL_VERSION_NUM 0xXXYYZZ

Where XX , YY and ZZ are the main version, release and patch numbers in hexadecimal. All three
number fields are always represented using two digits (eight bits each). 1.2.0 would appear as "0x010200"
while version 9.11.7 appears as "0x090b07".

This 6-digit hexadecimal number is always a greater number in a more recent release. It makes
comparisons with greater than and less than work.

This number is also available as three separate defines: LIBCURL_VERSION_MAJOR ,

LIBCURL_VERSION_MINOR and LIBCURL_VERSION_PATCH .

These defines are, of course, only suitable to figure out the version number built just now and they will not
help you figuring out which libcurl version that is used at runtime three years from now.

Which libcurl version runs

To figure out which libcurl version that your application is using right now, curl_version_info() is
there for you.

Applications should use this function to judge if things are possible to do or not, instead of using compile-
time checks, as dynamic/DLL libraries can be changed independent of applications.

curl_version_info() returns a pointer to a struct with information about version numbers and various features
and in the running version of libcurl. You call it by giving it a special age counter so that libcurl knows the
"age" of the libcurl that calls it. The age is a define called CURLVERSION_NOW and is a counter that is
increased at irregular intervals throughout the curl development. The age number tells libcurl what struct set
it can return.

You call the function like this:

 curl_version_info_data *version = curl_version_info( CURLVERSION_NOW );

The data will then be pointing at struct that has or at least can have the following layout:

struct {
CURLversion age; /* see description below */

/* when 'age' is 0 or higher, the members below also exist: */

const char *version; /* human readable string */
unsigned int version_num; /* numeric representation */
const char *host; /* human readable string */
int features; /* bitmask, see below */
char *ssl_version; /* human readable string */
long ssl_version_num; /* not used, always zero */
const char *libz_version; /* human readable string */
const char * const *protocols; /* protocols */

/* when 'age' is 1 or higher, the members below also exist: */

const char *ares; /* human readable string */
int ares_num; /* number */

/* when 'age' is 2 or higher, the member below also exists: */

const char *libidn; /* human readable string */

/* when 'age' is 3 or higher (7.16.1 or later), the members below also

exist */
int iconv_ver_num; /* '_libiconv_version' if iconv support enabled */

const char *libssh_version; /* human readable string */

/* when 'age' is 4 or higher, the member below also exists: */

unsigned int brotli_ver_num; /* Numeric Brotli version
(MAJOR << 24) | (MINOR << 12) | PATCH */
const char *brotli_version; /* human readable string. */

/* when 'age' is 5 or higher, the member below also exists: */

unsigned int nghttp2_ver_num; /* Numeric nghttp2 version
(MAJOR << 16) | (MINOR << 8) | PATCH */
const char *nghttp2_version; /* human readable string. */
const char *quic_version; /* human readable quic (+ HTTP/3) library +
version or NULL */

/* when 'age' is 6 or higher, the member below also exists: */

const char *cainfo; /* the built-in default CURLOPT_CAINFO, might
be NULL */
const char *capath; /* the built-in default CURLOPT_CAPATH, might
be NULL */

/* when 'age' is 7 or higher, the member below also exists: */

unsigned int zstd_ver_num; /* Numeric Zstd version
 (MAJOR << 24) | (MINOR << 12) | PATCH */
const char *zstd_version; /* human readable string. */

/* when 'age' is 8 or higher, the member below also exists: */

const char *hyper_version; /* human readable string. */

} curl_version_info_data;

--libcurl

We actively encourage users to first try out the transfer they want to do with the curl command-line tool, and
once it works roughly the way you want it to, you append the --libcurl [filename] option to the
command line and run it again.

The --libcurl command-line option will create a C program in the provided file name. That C program
is an application that uses libcurl to run the transfer you just had the curl command-line tool do. There are
some exceptions and it is not always a 100% match, but you will find that it can serve as an excellent
inspiration source for what libcurl options you want or can use and what additional arguments to provide to
them.

If you specify the filename as a single dash, as in --libcurl - you will get the program written to stdout
instead of a file.

As an example, we run a command to get http://example.com :

curl http://example.com --libcurl example.c

This creates example.c in the current directory, looking similar to this:

/********* Sample code generated by the curl command-line tool **********

* All curl_easy_setopt() options are documented at:
* https://curl.se/libcurl/c/curl_easy_setopt.html
************************************************************************/
#include <curl/curl.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])

{
CURLcode ret;
CURL *hnd;

hnd = curl_easy_init();
curl_easy_setopt(hnd, CURLOPT_URL, "http://example.com");
curl_easy_setopt(hnd, CURLOPT_NOPROGRESS, 1L);
curl_easy_setopt(hnd, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "curl/7.45.0");
curl_easy_setopt(hnd, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 50L);
curl_easy_setopt(hnd, CURLOPT_SSH_KNOWNHOSTS, "/home/daniel/.ssh/known_hosts");
curl_easy_setopt(hnd, CURLOPT_TCP_KEEPALIVE, 1L);
 /* Here is a list of options the curl code used that cannot get generated
as source easily. You may select to either not use them or implement
them yourself.

CURLOPT_WRITEDATA set to a objectpointer

CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION set to a functionpointer
CURLOPT_READDATA set to a objectpointer
CURLOPT_READFUNCTION set to a functionpointer
CURLOPT_SEEKDATA set to a objectpointer
CURLOPT_SEEKFUNCTION set to a functionpointer
CURLOPT_ERRORBUFFER set to a objectpointer
CURLOPT_STDERR set to a objectpointer
CURLOPT_HEADERFUNCTION set to a functionpointer
CURLOPT_HEADERDATA set to a objectpointer

*/

ret = curl_easy_perform(hnd);

curl_easy_cleanup(hnd);
hnd = NULL;

return (int)ret;
}
/**** End of sample code ****/

Global initialization

Before you do anything libcurl related in your program, you should do a global libcurl initialize call with
curl_global_init() . This is necessary because some underlying libraries that libcurl might be using
need a call ahead to get setup and initialized properly.

curl_global_init() is, unfortunately, not thread safe, so you must ensure that you only do it once and never
simultaneously with another call. It initializes global state so you should only call it once, and once your
program is completely done using libcurl you can call curl_global_cleanup() to free and clean up
the associated global resources the init call allocated.

libcurl is built to handle the situation where you skip the curl_global_init() call, but it does so by
calling it itself instead (if you did not do it before any actual file transfer starts) and it then uses its own
defaults. But beware that it is still not thread safe even then, so it might cause some "interesting" side effects
for you. It is much better to call curl_global_init() yourself in a controlled manner.

multi-threading

libcurl is thread safe but has no internal thread synchronization. You may have to provide your own locking
or change options to properly use libcurl threaded. Exactly what is required depends on how libcurl was
built. Please refer to the libcurl thread safety web page, which contains the latest information.
curl easy options

You set options in the easy handle to control how that transfer is going to be done, or in some cases you can
actually set options and modify the transfer's behavior while it is in progress. You set options with
curl_easy_setopt() and you provide the handle, the option you want to set and the argument to the
option. All options take exactly one argument and you must always pass exactly three parameters to the
curl_easy_setopt() calls.

Since the curl_easy_setopt() call accepts several hundred different options and the various options
accept a variety of different types of arguments, it is important to read up on the specifics and provide exactly
the argument type the specific option supports and expects. Passing in the wrong type can lead to
unexpected side-effects or hard to understand hiccups.

The perhaps most important option that every transfer needs, is the URL. libcurl cannot perform a transfer
without knowing which URL it concerns so you must tell it. The URL option name is CURLOPT_URL as all
options are prefixed with CURLOPT_ and then the descriptive name — all using uppercase letters. An
example line setting the URL to get the http://example.com HTTP contents could look like:

CURLcode ret = curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_URL, "http://example.com");

Again: this only sets the option in the handle. It will not do the actual transfer or anything. It will just tell libcurl
to copy the string and if that works it returns OK.

It is, of course, good form to check the return code to see that nothing went wrong.

Get options
There is no way to extract the values previously set with curl_easy_setopt() . If you need to be able to
extract the information again that you set earlier, we encourage you to keep track of that data yourself in your
application.

Set numerical options

Since curl_easy_setopt() is a vararg function where the 3rd argument can use different types
depending on the situation, normal C language type conversion cannot be done. So you must make sure
that you truly pass a long and not an int if the documentation tells you so. On architectures where they
are the same size, you may not get any problems but not all work like that. Similarly, for options that accept a
curl_off_t type, it is crucial that you pass in an argument using that type and no other.

Enforce a long :

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 5L); /* 5 seconds timeout */

Enforce a curl_off_t :

curl_off_t no_larger_than = 0x50000;

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_MAXFILESIZE_LARGE, no_larger_than);

Set string options

There are currently over 80 options for curl_easy_setopt() that accept a string as its third argument.

When a string is set in a handle, libcurl immediately copies that data so that the application does not have to
keep the data around for the time the transfer is being done - with one notable exception:
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS .

Set a URL in the handle:

curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com");

CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS
The exception to the rule that libcurl always copies data, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS only stores the pointer
to the data, meaning an application using this option must keep the memory around for the entire duration of
the associated transfer.

If that is problematic, an alternative is to instead use CURLOPT_COPYPOSTFIELDS which copies the data.
If the data is binary and does not stop at the first presence of a null byte, make sure that
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDSIZE is set before this option is used.

Why?

The reason CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS is an exception is due to legacy. Originally (before curl 7.17.0), libcurl
did not copy any string arguments and when this current behavior was introduced, this option could not be
converted over without breaking behavior so it had to keep working like before. Which now sticks out, as no
other option does...

C++
If you use libcurl from a C++ program, it is important to remember that you cannot pass in a string object
where libcurl expects a string. It has to be a null terminated C string. Usually you can make this happen with
the c_str() method.
For example, keep the URL in a string object and set that in the handle:

std::string url("https://example.com/");
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, url.c_str());

TLS options

At the time of writing this, there are no less than forty different options for curl_easy_setopt that are
dedicated for controlling how libcurl does SSL and TLS.

Transfers done using TLS use safe defaults but since curl is used in many different scenarios and setups,
chances are you will end up in situations where you want to change those behaviors.

Protocol version
With CURLOPT_SSLVERSION' and CURLOPT_PROXY_SSLVERSION`you can specify which SSL or
TLS protocol range that is acceptable to you. Traditionally SSL and TLS protocol versions have been found
detect and unsuitable for use over time and even if curl itself will raise its default lower version over time you
might want to opt for only using the latest and most security protocol versions.

These options take a lowest acceptable version and optionally a maximum. If the server cannot negotiate a
connection with that condition, the transfer will fail.

Example:

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_SSLVERSION, CURL_SSLVERSION_TLSv1_2);

Protocol details and behavior

You can select what ciphers to use by setting CURLOPT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST and
CURLOPT_PROXY_SSL_CIPHER_LIST .

You can ask to enable SSL "False Start" with CURLOPT_SSL_FALSESTART , and there are a few other
behavior changes to tweak using CURLOPT_SSL_OPTIONS .

Verification
A TLS-using client needs to verify that the server it speaks to is the correct and trusted one. This is done by
verifying that the server's certificate is signed by a Certificate Authority (CA) for which curl has a public key
for and that the certificate contains the server's name. Failing any of these checks will cause the transfer to
fail.

For development purposes and for experimenting, curl allows an application to switch off either or both of
these checks for the server or for an HTTPS proxy.

CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER controls the check that the certificate is signed by a trusted CA.

CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST controls the check for the name within the certificate.

CURLOPT_PROXY_SSL_VERIFYPEER is the proxy version of CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER .

CURLOPT_PROXY_SSL_VERIFYHOST is the proxy version of CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST .

Optionally, you can tell curl to verify the certificate's public key against a known hash using
CURLOPT_PINNEDPUBLICKEY or CURLOPT_PROXY_PINNEDPUBLICKEY . Here too, a mismatch will
cause the transfer to fail.

Authentication

TLS Client certificates

When using TLS and the server asks the client to authenticate using certificates, you typically specify the
private key and the corresponding client certificate using CURLOPT_SSLKEY and CURLOPT_SSLCERT .
The password for the key is usually also required to be set, with CURLOPT_SSLKEYPASSWD .

Again, the same set of options exist separately for connections to HTTPS proxies:
CURLOPT_PROXY_SSLKEY , CURLOPT_PROXY_SSLCERT etc.

TLS auth

TLS connections offer a (rarely used) feature called Secure Remote Passwords. Using this, you
authenticate the connection for the server using a name and password and the options are called
CURLOPT_TLSAUTH_USERNAME and CURLOPT_TLSAUTH_PASSWORD .

STARTTLS
For protocols that are using the STARTTLS method to upgrade the connection to TLS (FTP, IMAP, POP3,
and SMTP), you usually tell curl to use the non-TLS version of the protocol when specifying a URL and then
ask curl to enable TLS with the CURLOPT_USE_SSL option.

This option allows a client to let curl continue if it cannot upgrade to TLS, but that is not a recommend path to
walk as then you might be using an insecure protocol without properly noticing.

/* require use of SSL for this, or fail */

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_USE_SSL, CURLUSESSL_ALL);
All options

This is a table of a complete list of all available options for curl_easy_setopt() as of what will be
present in the 7.83.0 release, April 2022.

Option Purpose

CURLOPT_ABSTRACT_UNIX_SOCKET abstract Unix domain socket

CURLOPT_ACCEPTTIMEOUT_MS timeout waiting for FTP server to connect back

CURLOPT_ACCEPT_ENCODING automatic decompression of HTTP downloads

CURLOPT_ADDRESS_SCOPE scope id for IPv6 addresses

CURLOPT_ALTSVC alt-svc cache file name

CURLOPT_ALTSVC_CTRL control alt-svc behavior

CURLOPT_APPEND append to the remote file

CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER automatically update the referer header

CURLOPT_AWS_SIGV4 V4 signature

CURLOPT_BUFFERSIZE receive buffer size

CURLOPT_CAINFO path to Certificate Authority (CA) bundle

CURLOPT_CAINFO_BLOB Certificate Authority (CA) bundle in PEM format

CURLOPT_CAPATH directory holding CA certificates

CURLOPT_CERTINFO request SSL certificate information

CURLOPT_CHUNK_BGN_FUNCTION callback before a transfer with FTP wildcardmatch

CURLOPT_CHUNK_DATA pointer passed to the FTP chunk callbacks

CURLOPT_CHUNK_END_FUNCTION callback after a transfer with FTP wildcardmatch

CURLOPT_CLOSESOCKETDATA pointer passed to the socket close callback

CURLOPT_CLOSESOCKETFUNCTION callback to socket close replacement

CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT timeout for the connect phase

CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT_MS timeout for the connect phase

CURLOPT_CONNECT_ONLY stop when connected to target server

 connect to a specific host and port instead of the
CURLOPT_CONNECT_TO
URL's host and port

CURLOPT_CONV_FROM_NETWORK_FUNCTION convert data from network to host encoding

CURLOPT_CONV_FROM_UTF8_FUNCTION convert data from UTF8 to host encoding

CURLOPT_CONV_TO_NETWORK_FUNCTION convert data to network from host encoding

CURLOPT_COOKIE HTTP Cookie header

CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE file name to read cookies from

CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR file name to store cookies to

CURLOPT_COOKIELIST add to or manipulate cookies held in memory

CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION start a new cookie session

CURLOPT_COPYPOSTFIELDS have libcurl copy data to POST

CURLOPT_CRLF CRLF conversion

CURLOPT_CRLFILE Certificate Revocation List file

CURLOPT_CURLU URL in CURLU * format

CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST custom request method

CURLOPT_DEBUGDATA pointer passed to the debug callback

CURLOPT_DEBUGFUNCTION debug callback

CURLOPT_DEFAULT_PROTOCOL default protocol to use if the URL is missing a

CURLOPT_DIRLISTONLY ask for names only in a directory listing

CURLOPT_DISALLOW_USERNAME_IN_URL disallow specifying username in the URL

CURLOPT_DNS_CACHE_TIMEOUT life-time for DNS cache entries

CURLOPT_DNS_INTERFACE interface to speak DNS over

CURLOPT_DNS_LOCAL_IP4 IPv4 address to bind DNS resolves to

CURLOPT_DNS_LOCAL_IP6 IPv6 address to bind DNS resolves to

CURLOPT_DNS_SERVERS DNS servers to use

CURLOPT_DNS_SHUFFLE_ADDRESSES shuffle IP addresses for hostname

CURLOPT_DNS_USE_GLOBAL_CACHE global DNS cache

CURLOPT_DOH_SSL_VERIFYHOST verify the host name in the DoH SSL certificate

CURLOPT_DOH_SSL_VERIFYPEER verify the DoH SSL certificate
CURLOPT_DOH_SSL_VERIFYSTATUS verify the DoH SSL certificate's status

CURLOPT_DOH_URL provide the DNS-over-HTTPS URL

CURLOPT_EGDSOCKET EGD socket path

CURLOPT_ERRORBUFFER error buffer for error messages

CURLOPT_EXPECT_100_TIMEOUT_MS timeout for Expect: 100-continue response

CURLOPT_FAILONERROR request failure on HTTP response >= 400

CURLOPT_FILETIME get the modification time of the remote resource

CURLOPT_FNMATCH_DATA pointer passed to the fnmatch callback

CURLOPT_FNMATCH_FUNCTION wildcard match callback

CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION follow HTTP 3xx redirects

CURLOPT_FORBID_REUSE make connection get closed at once after use

CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT force a new connection to be used

CURLOPT_FTPPORT make FTP transfer active

CURLOPT_FTPSSLAUTH order in which to attempt TLS vs SSL

CURLOPT_FTP_ACCOUNT account info for FTP

CURLOPT_FTP_ALTERNATIVE_TO_USER command to use instead of USER with FTP

CURLOPT_FTP_CREATE_MISSING_DIRS create missing dirs for FTP and SFTP

CURLOPT_FTP_FILEMETHOD select directory traversing method for FTP

CURLOPT_FTP_RESPONSE_TIMEOUT time allowed to wait for FTP response

CURLOPT_FTP_SKIP_PASV_IP ignore the IP address in the PASV response

CURLOPT_FTP_SSL_CCC switch off SSL again with FTP after auth

CURLOPT_FTP_USE_EPRT use EPRT for FTP

CURLOPT_FTP_USE_EPSV use EPSV for FTP

CURLOPT_FTP_USE_PRET use PRET for FTP

CURLOPT_GSSAPI_DELEGATION allowed GSS-API delegation

CURLOPT_HAPPY_EYEBALLS_TIMEOUT_MS head start for ipv6 for happy eyeballs

CURLOPT_HAPROXYPROTOCOL send HAProxy PROXY protocol v1 header

CURLOPT_HEADER pass headers to the data stream

CURLOPT_HEADERDATA pointer to pass to header callback

CURLOPT_HEADERFUNCTION callback that receives header data

send HTTP headers to both proxy and host or

CURLOPT_HEADEROPT
separately

CURLOPT_HSTS HSTS cache file name

CURLOPT_HSTSREADDATA pointer passed to the HSTS read callback

CURLOPT_HSTSREADFUNCTION read callback for HSTS hosts

CURLOPT_HSTSWRITEDATA pointer passed to the HSTS write callback

CURLOPT_HSTSWRITEFUNCTION write callback for HSTS hosts

CURLOPT_HSTS_CTRL control HSTS behavior

CURLOPT_HTTP09_ALLOWED allow HTTP/0.9 response

CURLOPT_HTTP200ALIASES alternative matches for HTTP 200 OK

CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH HTTP server authentication methods to try

CURLOPT_HTTPGET ask for an HTTP GET request

CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER set of HTTP headers

CURLOPT_HTTPPOST multipart formpost content

CURLOPT_HTTPPROXYTUNNEL tunnel through HTTP proxy

CURLOPT_HTTP_CONTENT_DECODING HTTP content decoding control

CURLOPT_HTTP_TRANSFER_DECODING HTTP transfer decoding control

CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION HTTP protocol version to use

CURLOPT_IGNORE_CONTENT_LENGTH ignore content length

CURLOPT_INFILESIZE size of the input file to send off

CURLOPT_INFILESIZE_LARGE size of the input file to send off

CURLOPT_INTERFACE source interface for outgoing traffic

CURLOPT_INTERLEAVEDATA pointer passed to RTSP interleave callback

CURLOPT_INTERLEAVEFUNCTION callback for RTSP interleaved data

CURLOPT_IOCTLDATA pointer passed to I/O callback

CURLOPT_IOCTLFUNCTION callback for I/O operations
CURLOPT_IPRESOLVE IP protocol version to use

CURLOPT_ISSUERCERT issuer SSL certificate filename

CURLOPT_ISSUERCERT_BLOB issuer SSL certificate from memory blob

CURLOPT_KEEP_SENDING_ON_ERROR keep sending on early HTTP response >= 300

CURLOPT_KEYPASSWD passphrase to private key

CURLOPT_KRBLEVEL FTP kerberos security level

CURLOPT_LOCALPORT local port number to use for socket

CURLOPT_LOCALPORTRANGE number of additional local ports to try

CURLOPT_LOGIN_OPTIONS login options

CURLOPT_LOW_SPEED_LIMIT low speed limit in bytes per second

CURLOPT_LOW_SPEED_TIME low speed limit time period

CURLOPT_MAIL_AUTH SMTP authentication address

CURLOPT_MAIL_FROM SMTP sender address

CURLOPT_MAIL_RCPT list of SMTP mail recipients

allow RCPT TO command to fail for some

CURLOPT_MAIL_RCPT_ALLLOWFAILS
recipients

CURLOPT_MAXAGE_CONN max idle time allowed for reusing a connection

CURLOPT_MAXCONNECTS maximum connection cache size

CURLOPT_MAXFILESIZE maximum file size allowed to download

CURLOPT_MAXFILESIZE_LARGE maximum file size allowed to download

max lifetime (since creation) allowed for reusing a

CURLOPT_MAXLIFETIME_CONN
connection

CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS maximum number of redirects allowed

CURLOPT_MAX_RECV_SPEED_LARGE rate limit data download speed

CURLOPT_MAX_SEND_SPEED_LARGE rate limit data upload speed

CURLOPT_MIMEPOST send data from mime structure

CURLOPT_MIME_OPTIONS set MIME option flags

CURLOPT_NETRC enable use of .netrc

CURLOPT_NETRC_FILE file name to read .netrc info from

CURLOPT_NEW_DIRECTORY_PERMS permissions for remotely created directories

CURLOPT_NEW_FILE_PERMS permissions for remotely created files

CURLOPT_NOBODY do the download request without getting the body

CURLOPT_NOPROGRESS switch off the progress meter

CURLOPT_NOPROXY disable proxy use for specific hosts

CURLOPT_NOSIGNAL skip all signal handling

CURLOPT_OPENSOCKETDATA pointer passed to open socket callback

CURLOPT_OPENSOCKETFUNCTION callback for opening socket

CURLOPT_PASSWORD password to use in authentication

CURLOPT_PATH_AS_IS do not handle dot dot sequences

CURLOPT_PINNEDPUBLICKEY pinned public key

CURLOPT_PIPEWAIT wait for pipelining/multiplexing

CURLOPT_PORT remote port number to connect to

CURLOPT_POST make an HTTP POST

CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS data to POST to server

CURLOPT_POSTFIELDSIZE size of POST data pointed to

CURLOPT_POSTFIELDSIZE_LARGE size of POST data pointed to

CURLOPT_POSTQUOTE (S)FTP commands to run after the transfer

CURLOPT_POSTREDIR how to act on an HTTP POST redirect

CURLOPT_PREQUOTE commands to run before an FTP transfer

CURLOPT_PREREQDATA pointer passed to the pre-request callback

CURLOPT_PREREQFUNCTION user callback called when a connection has been

CURLOPT_PRE_PROXY pre-proxy host to use

CURLOPT_PRIVATE store a private pointer

CURLOPT_PROGRESSDATA pointer passed to the progress callback

CURLOPT_PROGRESSFUNCTION progress meter callback

CURLOPT_PROTOCOLS allowed protocols

CURLOPT_PROXY proxy to use

CURLOPT_PROXYAUTH HTTP proxy authentication methods

CURLOPT_PROXYHEADER set of HTTP headers to pass to proxy

CURLOPT_PROXYPASSWORD password to use with proxy authentication

CURLOPT_PROXYPORT port number the proxy listens on

CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE proxy protocol type

CURLOPT_PROXYUSERNAME user name to use for proxy authentication

user name and password to use for proxy

CURLOPT_PROXYUSERPWD
authentication

CURLOPT_PROXY_CAINFO path to proxy Certificate Authority (CA) bundle

proxy Certificate Authority (CA) bundle in PEM

CURLOPT_PROXY_CAINFO_BLOB
format

CURLOPT_PROXY_CAPATH directory holding HTTPS proxy CA certificates

CURLOPT_PROXY_CRLFILE HTTPS proxy Certificate Revocation List file

CURLOPT_PROXY_ISSUERCERT proxy issuer SSL certificate filename

CURLOPT_PROXY_ISSUERCERT_BLOB proxy issuer SSL certificate from memory blob

CURLOPT_PROXY_KEYPASSWD passphrase for the proxy private key

CURLOPT_PROXY_PINNEDPUBLICKEY pinned public key for https proxy

CURLOPT_PROXY_SERVICE_NAME proxy authentication service name

CURLOPT_PROXY_SSLCERT HTTPS proxy client certificate

CURLOPT_PROXY_SSLCERTTYPE type of the proxy client SSL certificate

CURLOPT_PROXY_SSLCERT_BLOB SSL proxy client certificate from memory blob

CURLOPT_PROXY_SSLKEY private keyfile for HTTPS proxy client cert

CURLOPT_PROXY_SSLKEYTYPE type of the proxy private key file

CURLOPT_PROXY_SSLKEY_BLOB private key for proxy cert from memory blob

CURLOPT_PROXY_SSLVERSION preferred HTTPS proxy TLS version

CURLOPT_PROXY_SSL_CIPHER_LIST ciphers to use for HTTPS proxy

CURLOPT_PROXY_SSL_OPTIONS HTTPS proxy SSL behavior options

CURLOPT_PROXY_SSL_VERIFYHOST verify the proxy certificate's name against host

CURLOPT_PROXY_SSL_VERIFYPEER verify the proxy's SSL certificate

CURLOPT_PROXY_TLS13_CIPHERS ciphers suites for proxy TLS 1.3

CURLOPT_PROXY_TLSAUTH_PASSWORD password to use for proxy TLS authentication

CURLOPT_PROXY_TLSAUTH_TYPE HTTPS proxy TLS authentication methods

CURLOPT_PROXY_TLSAUTH_USERNAME user name to use for proxy TLS authentication

CURLOPT_PROXY_TRANSFER_MODE append FTP transfer mode to URL for proxy

CURLOPT_PUT make an HTTP PUT request

CURLOPT_QUOTE (S)FTP commands to run before transfer

CURLOPT_RANDOM_FILE file to read random data from

CURLOPT_RANGE byte range to request

CURLOPT_READDATA pointer passed to the read callback

CURLOPT_READFUNCTION read callback for data uploads

CURLOPT_REDIR_PROTOCOLS protocols allowed to redirect to

CURLOPT_REFERER the HTTP referer header

CURLOPT_REQUEST_TARGET alternative target for this request

CURLOPT_RESOLVE provide custom host name to IP address resolves

CURLOPT_RESOLVER_START_DATA pointer passed to the resolver start callback

callback called before a new name resolve is

CURLOPT_RESOLVER_START_FUNCTION
started

CURLOPT_RESUME_FROM offset to resume transfer from

CURLOPT_RESUME_FROM_LARGE offset to resume transfer from

CURLOPT_RTSP_CLIENT_CSEQ RTSP client CSEQ number

CURLOPT_RTSP_REQUEST RTSP request

CURLOPT_RTSP_SERVER_CSEQ RTSP server CSEQ number

CURLOPT_RTSP_SESSION_ID RTSP session ID

CURLOPT_RTSP_STREAM_URI RTSP stream URI

CURLOPT_RTSP_TRANSPORT RTSP Transport: header

CURLOPT_SASL_AUTHZID authorization identity (identity to act as)

CURLOPT_SASL_IR send initial response in first packet

CURLOPT_SEEKDATA pointer passed to the seek callback

CURLOPT_SEEKFUNCTION user callback for seeking in input stream

CURLOPT_SERVICE_NAME authentication service name

CURLOPT_SHARE share handle to use

CURLOPT_SOCKOPTDATA pointer to pass to sockopt callback

CURLOPT_SOCKOPTFUNCTION callback for setting socket options

CURLOPT_SOCKS5_AUTH methods for SOCKS5 proxy authentication

CURLOPT_SOCKS5_GSSAPI_NEC socks proxy gssapi negotiation protection

CURLOPT_SOCKS5_GSSAPI_SERVICE SOCKS5 proxy authentication service name

CURLOPT_SSH_AUTH_TYPES auth types for SFTP and SCP

CURLOPT_SSH_COMPRESSION enable SSH compression

CURLOPT_SSH_HOST_PUBLIC_KEY_MD5 MD5 checksum of SSH server public key

CURLOPT_SSH_HOST_PUBLIC_KEY_SHA256 SHA256 hash of SSH server public key

CURLOPT_SSH_KEYDATA pointer passed to the SSH key callback

CURLOPT_SSH_KEYFUNCTION callback for known host matching logic

CURLOPT_SSH_KNOWNHOSTS file name holding the SSH known hosts

CURLOPT_SSH_PRIVATE_KEYFILE private key file for SSH auth

CURLOPT_SSH_PUBLIC_KEYFILE public key file for SSH auth

CURLOPT_SSLCERT SSL client certificate

CURLOPT_SSLCERTTYPE type of client SSL certificate

CURLOPT_SSLCERT_BLOB SSL client certificate from memory blob

CURLOPT_SSLENGINE SSL engine identifier

CURLOPT_SSLENGINE_DEFAULT make SSL engine default

CURLOPT_SSLKEY private keyfile for TLS and SSL client cert

CURLOPT_SSLKEYTYPE type of the private key file

CURLOPT_SSLKEY_BLOB private key for client cert from memory blob

CURLOPT_SSLVERSION preferred TLS/SSL version

CURLOPT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST ciphers to use for TLS

CURLOPT_SSL_CTX_DATA pointer passed to ssl_ctx callback

SSL context callback for OpenSSL, wolfSSL or

CURLOPT_SSL_CTX_FUNCTION
mbedTLS

CURLOPT_SSL_EC_CURVES key exchange curves

CURLOPT_SSL_ENABLE_ALPN Application Layer Protocol Negotiation

CURLOPT_SSL_ENABLE_NPN use NPN

CURLOPT_SSL_FALSESTART TLS false start

CURLOPT_SSL_OPTIONS SSL behavior options

CURLOPT_SSL_SESSIONID_CACHE use the SSL session-ID cache

CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST verify the certificate's name against host

CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER verify the peer's SSL certificate

CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYSTATUS verify the certificate's status

CURLOPT_STDERR redirect stderr to another stream

CURLOPT_STREAM_DEPENDS stream this transfer depends on

CURLOPT_STREAM_DEPENDS_E stream this transfer depends on exclusively

CURLOPT_STREAM_WEIGHT numerical stream weight

suppress proxy CONNECT response headers fro

CURLOPT_SUPPRESS_CONNECT_HEADERS
user callbacks

CURLOPT_TCP_FASTOPEN TCP Fast Open

CURLOPT_TCP_KEEPALIVE TCP keep-alive probing

CURLOPT_TCP_KEEPIDLE TCP keep-alive idle time wait

CURLOPT_TCP_KEEPINTVL TCP keep-alive interval

CURLOPT_TCP_NODELAY the TCP_NODELAY option

CURLOPT_TELNETOPTIONS set of telnet options

CURLOPT_TFTP_BLKSIZE TFTP block size

CURLOPT_TFTP_NO_OPTIONS send no TFTP options requests

CURLOPT_TIMECONDITION select condition for a time request

CURLOPT_TIMEOUT maximum time the transfer is allowed to complete

CURLOPT_TIMEOUT_MS maximum time the transfer is allowed to complete

CURLOPT_TIMEVALUE time value for conditional

CURLOPT_TIMEVALUE_LARGE time value for conditional

CURLOPT_TLS13_CIPHERS ciphers suites to use for TLS 1.3

CURLOPT_TLSAUTH_PASSWORD password to use for TLS authentication

CURLOPT_TLSAUTH_TYPE TLS authentication methods

CURLOPT_TLSAUTH_USERNAME user name to use for TLS authentication

CURLOPT_TRAILERDATA pointer passed to trailing headers callback

CURLOPT_TRAILERFUNCTION callback for sending trailing headers

CURLOPT_TRANSFERTEXT request a text based transfer for FTP

CURLOPT_TRANSFER_ENCODING ask for HTTP Transfer Encoding

CURLOPT_UNIX_SOCKET_PATH Unix domain socket

CURLOPT_UNRESTRICTED_AUTH send credentials to other hosts too

CURLOPT_UPKEEP_INTERVAL_MS connection upkeep interval

CURLOPT_UPLOAD data upload

CURLOPT_UPLOAD_BUFFERSIZE upload buffer size

CURLOPT_URL URL for this transfer

CURLOPT_USERAGENT HTTP user-agent header

CURLOPT_USERNAME user name to use in authentication

CURLOPT_USERPWD user name and password to use in authentication

CURLOPT_USE_SSL request using SSL / TLS for the transfer

CURLOPT_VERBOSE verbose mode

CURLOPT_WILDCARDMATCH directory wildcard transfers

CURLOPT_WRITEDATA pointer passed to the write callback

CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION callback for writing received data

CURLOPT_XFERINFODATA pointer passed to the progress callback

CURLOPT_XFERINFOFUNCTION progress meter callback

 CURLOPT XOAUTH2 BEARER OAuth 2 0 access token

Get option information

libcurl offers an API, a set of functions really, that allow applications to get information about all currently
support easy options. It does not return the values for the options, but it rather informs about name, ID and
type of the option.

Iterate over all options

A modern libcurl supports nearly 300 different options. With the use of curl_easy_option_by_next()
an application can iterate over all the known options and return a pointer to a struct
curl_easyoption for them.

This function only returns information about options that this exact libcurl build knows about. Other options
may exist in newer libcurl builds, or in builds that enable/disable options differently at build-time.

Example, iterate over all available options:

const struct curl_easyoption *opt;

opt = curl_easy_option_by_next(NULL);
while(opt) {
printf("Name: %s\n", opt->name);
opt = curl_easy_option_by_next(opt);
}

Find a specific option by name

Given a specific easy option name, you can ask libcurl to return a pointer to a struct
curl_easyoption for it. The name should be provided without the CURLOPT_ prefix.

As an example, an application can ask libcurl about the CURLOPT_VERBOSE option like this:

const struct curl_easyoption *opt = curl_easy_option_by_name("VERBOSE");

if(opt) {
printf("This option wants CURLoption %x\n", (int)opt->id);
}

Find a specific option by ID

Given a specific easy option ID, you can ask libcurl to return a pointer to a struct curl_easyoption
for it. The "ID" is the CURLOPT_ -prefixed symbol as provided in the public curl/curl.h header file.

An application can ask libcurl for the name of the CURLOPT_VERBOSE option like this:

const struct curl_easyoption *opt =

curl_easy_option_by_id(CURLOP_VERBOSE);
if(opt) {
printf("This option has the name: %s\n", opt->name);
}

The curl_easyoption struct

struct curl_easyoption {
const char *name;
CURLoption id;
curl_easytype type;
unsigned int flags;
};

There is only one bit with a defined meaning in 'flags': if CURLOT_FLAG_ALIAS is set, it means that that
option is an "alias". A name provided for backwards compatibility that is nowadays rather served by an
option with another name. If you lookup the ID for an alias, you will get the new canonical name for that
option.

CURLcode return codes

Many libcurl functions return a CURLcode. That is a special libcurl typedefed variable for error codes. It
returns CURLE_OK (which has the value zero) if everything is fine and dandy and it returns a non-zero
number if a problem was detected. There are almost one hundred CURLcode errors in use, and you can
find them all in the curl/curl.h header file and documented in the libcurl-errors man page.

You can convert a CURLcode into a human readable string with the curl_easy_strerror() function
—but be aware that these errors are rarely phrased in a way that is suitable for anyone to expose in a UI or
to an end user:

const char *str = curl_easy_strerror( error );

printf("libcurl said %s\n", str);

Another way to get a slightly better error text in case of errors is to set the CURLOPT_ERRORBUFFER option
to point out a buffer in your program and then libcurl will store a related error message there before it returns
an error:
 char error[CURL_ERROR_SIZE]; /* needs to be at least this big */
CURLcode ret = curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_ERRORBUFFER, error);

Verbose operations

Okay, we just showed how to get the error as a human readable text as that is an excellent help to figure out
what went wrong in a particular transfer and often explains why it can be done like that or what the problem
is for the moment.

The next lifesaver when writing libcurl applications that everyone needs to know about and needs to use
extensively, at least while developing libcurl applications or debugging libcurl itself, is to enable "verbose
mode" with CURLOPT_VERBOSE :

CURLcode ret = curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1L);

When libcurl is told to be verbose it will mention transfer-related details and information to stderr while the
transfer is ongoing. This is awesome to figure out why things fail and to learn exactly what libcurl does when
you ask it different things. You can redirect the output elsewhere by changing stderr with
CURLOPT_STDERR or you can get even more info in a fancier way with the debug callback (explained
further in a later section).

Trace everything
Verbose is certainly fine, but sometimes you need more. libcurl also offers a trace callback that in addition to
showing you all the stuff the verbose mode does, it also passes on all data sent and received so that your
application gets a full trace of everything.

The sent and received data passed to the trace callback is given to the callback in its unencrypted form,
which can be handy when working with TLS or SSH based protocols when capturing the data off the
network for debugging is not practical.

When you set the CURLOPT_DEBUGFUNCTION option, you still need to have CURLOPT_VERBOSE
enabled but with the trace callback set libcurl will use that callback instead of its internal handling.

The trace callback should match a prototype like this:

int my_trace(CURL *handle, curl_infotype type, char *data, size_t size,

void *user);

handle is the easy handle it concerns, type describes the particular data passed to the callback (data in/out,
header in/out, TLS data in/out and "text"), data is a pointer pointing to the data being size number of bytes.
user is the custom pointer you set with CURLOPT_DEBUGDATA .
The data pointed to by data will not be zero terminated, but will be exactly of the size as told by the size
argument
The callback must return 0 or libcurl will consider it an error and abort the transfer.

On the curl website, we host an example called debug.c that includes a simple trace function to get
inspiration from.

There are also additional details in the CURLOPT_DEBUGFUNCTION man page.

Caches

libcurl caches different information in order to help subsequent transfers to perform faster. There are three
key caches: DNS, connections and TLS sessions.

When the multi interface is used, these caches are by default shared among all the easy handles that are
added to that single multi handle, and when the easy interface is used they are kept within that handle.

You can instruct libcurl to share some of the caches with the share interface.

DNS cache
When libcurl resolves a host name to one or more IP addresses, that is stored in the DNS cache so that
subsequent transfers in the near term will not have to redo the same resolve again. A name resolve can
easily take several hundred milliseconds and sometimes even much longer.

By default, each such host name is stored in the cache for 60 seconds (changeable with
CURLOPT_DNS_CACHE_TIMEOUT ).

libcurl does in fact not usually know what the TTL (Time To Live) value is for DNS entries, as that is
generally not exposed in the system function calls it uses for this purpose, so increasing this value come
with a risk that libcurl keeps using stale addresses longer periods than necessary.

Connection cache
Also sometimes referred to as the connection pool. This is a collection of previously used connections that
instead of being closed after use, are kept around alive so that subsequent transfers that are targeting the
same host name and have several other checks also matching, can use them instead of creating a new
connection.

A reused connection usually saves having to a DNS lookup, setting up a TCP connection, do a TLS
handshake and more.

Connections are only reused if the name is identical. Even if two different host names resolve to the same IP
addresses, they will still always use two separate connections with libcurl.
Since the connection reuse is based on the host name and the DNS resolve phase is entirely skipped when
a connection is reused for a transfer, libcurl will not know the current state of the host name in DNS as it can
in fact change IP over time while the connection might survive and continue to get reused over the original
IP address.
The size of the connection cache - the number of live connections to keep there - can be set with
CURLOPT_MAXCONNECTS (default is 5) for easy handles and CURLMOPT_MAXCONNECTS for multi
handles. The default size for multi handles is 4 times the number of easy handles added.

TLS session cache

TLS session IDs and tickets are special TLS mechanisms that a client can pass to a server to shortcut
subsequent TLS handshakes to a server it previously established a connection to.

libcurl caches session IDs and tickets associated with host names and port numbers, so if a subsequent
connection attempt is made to a host for which libcurl has a cached ID or ticket, using that can greatly
decrease the TLS handshake process and therefore the time needed until completion.

libcurl examples

The native API for libcurl is in C so this chapter is focused on examples written in C. But since many
language bindings for libcurl are thin, they usually expose more or less the same functions and thus they
can still be interesting and educational for users of other languages, too.

Get a simple HTTP page

Get a page in memory

Submit a login form over HTTP

Get an FTP directory listing
Non-blocking HTTP form-post

Get a simple HTTP page

This example just fetches the HTML from a given URL and sends it to stdout. Possibly the simplest libcurl
program you can write.

By replacing the URL this will of course be able to get contents over other supported protocols as well.

Getting the output sent to stdout is a default behavior and usually not what you actually want. Most
applications will instead install a write callback to have receive the data that arrives.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <curl/curl.h>
 int main(void)
{
CURL *curl;
CURLcode res;

curl = curl_easy_init();
if(curl) {
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://example.com/");

/* Perform the request, res will get the return code */

res = curl_easy_perform(curl);
/* Check for errors */
if(res != CURLE_OK)
fprintf(stderr, "curl_easy_perform() failed: %s\n",
curl_easy_strerror(res));

/* always cleanup */
curl_easy_cleanup(curl);
}
return 0;
}

Get a response into memory

This example is a variation of the former that instead of sending the received data to stdout (which often is
not what you want), this example instead stores the incoming data in a memory buffer that is enlarged as the
incoming data grows.

It accomplishes this by using a write callback to receive the data.

This example uses a fixed URL string with a set URL scheme, but you can of course change this to use any
other supported protocol and then get a resource from that instead.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

#include <curl/curl.h>

struct MemoryStruct {
char *memory;
size_t size;
};

static size_t
WriteMemoryCallback(void *contents, size_t size, size_t nmemb, void *userp)
{
size_t realsize = size * nmemb;
 struct MemoryStruct *mem = (struct MemoryStruct *)userp;

mem->memory = realloc(mem->memory, mem->size + realsize + 1);

if(mem->memory == NULL) {
/* out of memory */
printf("not enough memory (realloc returned NULL)\n");
return 0;
}

memcpy(&(mem->memory[mem->size]), contents, realsize);

mem->size += realsize;
mem->memory[mem->size] = 0;

return realsize;
}

int main(void)
{
CURL *curl_handle;
CURLcode res;

struct MemoryStruct chunk;

chunk.memory = malloc(1); /* will be grown as needed by the realloc above */

chunk.size = 0; /* no data at this point */

curl_global_init(CURL_GLOBAL_ALL);

/* init the curl session */

curl_handle = curl_easy_init();

/* specify URL to get */

curl_easy_setopt(curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "https://www.example.com/");

/* send all data to this function */

curl_easy_setopt(curl_handle, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, WriteMemoryCallback);

/* we pass our 'chunk' struct to the callback function */

curl_easy_setopt(curl_handle, CURLOPT_WRITEDATA, (void *)&chunk);

/* some servers do not like requests that are made without a user-agent
field, so we provide one */
curl_easy_setopt(curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "libcurl-agent/1.0");

/* get it! */
res = curl_easy_perform(curl_handle);

/* check for errors */

if(res != CURLE_OK) {
fprintf(stderr, "curl_easy_perform() failed: %s\n",
curl_easy_strerror(res));
}
 else {
/*
* Now, our chunk.memory points to a memory block that is chunk.size
* bytes big and contains the remote file.
*
* Do something nice with it!
*/

printf("%lu bytes retrieved\n", (long)chunk.size);

}

/* cleanup curl stuff */

curl_easy_cleanup(curl_handle);

free(chunk.memory);

/* we are done with libcurl, so clean it up */

curl_global_cleanup();

return 0;
}

Submit a login form over HTTP

A login submission over HTTP is usually a matter of figuring out exactly what data to submit in a POST and
to which target URL to send it.

Once logged in, the target URL can be fetched if the proper cookies are used. As many login-systems work
with HTTP redirects, we ask libcurl to follow such if they arrive.

Some login forms will make it more complicated and require that you got cookies from the page showing the
login form etc, so if you need that you may want to extend this code a little bit.

By passing in a non-existing cookie file, this example will enable the cookie parser so incoming cookies will
be stored when the response from the login response arrives and then the subsequent request for the
resource will use those and prove to the server that we are in fact correctly logged in.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <curl/curl.h>

int main(void)
{
CURL *curl;
CURLcode res;

static const char *postthis = "user=daniel&password=monkey123";

curl = curl_easy_init();
 if(curl) {
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com/login.cgi");

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, postthis);

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1L); /* redirects! */
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, ""); /* no file */
res = curl_easy_perform(curl);
/* Check for errors */
if(res != CURLE_OK)
fprintf(stderr, "curl_easy_perform() failed: %s\n",
curl_easy_strerror(res));
else {
/*
* After the login POST, we have received the new cookies. Switch
* over to a GET and ask for the login-protected URL.
*/
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com/file");
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, 1L); /* no more POST */
res = curl_easy_perform(curl);
/* Check for errors */
if(res != CURLE_OK)
fprintf(stderr, "second curl_easy_perform() failed: %s\n",
curl_easy_strerror(res));
}
/* always cleanup */
curl_easy_cleanup(curl);
}
return 0;
}

Get an FTP directory listing

This example just fetches the FTP directory output from the given URL and sends it to stdout. The trailing
slash in the URL is what makes libcurl treat it as a directory.

#include <curl/curl.h>

int main(void)
{
CURL *curl;
CURLcode res;

curl_global_init(CURL_GLOBAL_DEFAULT);

curl = curl_easy_init();
if(curl) {
/*
* Make the URL end with a trailing slash!
*/
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "ftp://ftp.example.com/");
 res = curl_easy_perform(curl);

/* always cleanup */
curl_easy_cleanup(curl);

if(CURLE_OK != res) {
/* we failed */
fprintf(stderr, "curl told us %d\n", res);
}
}

curl_global_cleanup();

return 0;
}

Non-blocking HTTP form-post

This examples makes a multipart form-post using the multi interface.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/time.h>

#include <curl/curl.h>

int main(void)
{
CURL *curl;

CURLM *multi_handle;
int still_running = 0;

curl_mime *form = NULL;

curl_mimepart *field = NULL;
struct curl_slist *headerlist = NULL;
static const char buf[] = "Expect:";

curl = curl_easy_init();
multi_handle = curl_multi_init();

if(curl && multi_handle) {

/* Create the form */
form = curl_mime_init(curl);

/* Fill in the file upload field */

field = curl_mime_addpart(form);
curl_mime_name(field, "sendfile");
 curl_mime_filedata(field, "multi-post.c");

/* Fill in the filename field */

field = curl_mime_addpart(form);
curl_mime_name(field, "filename");
curl_mime_data(field, "multi-post.c", CURL_ZERO_TERMINATED);

/* Fill in the submit field too, even if this is rarely needed */

field = curl_mime_addpart(form);
curl_mime_name(field, "submit");
curl_mime_data(field, "send", CURL_ZERO_TERMINATED);

/* initialize custom header list (stating that Expect: 100-continue is not

wanted */
headerlist = curl_slist_append(headerlist, buf);

/* what URL that receives this POST */

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://www.example.com/upload.cgi");
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1L);

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, headerlist);

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_MIMEPOST, form);

curl_multi_add_handle(multi_handle, curl);

do {
CURLMcode mc = curl_multi_perform(multi_handle, &still_running);

if(still_running)
/* wait for activity, timeout or "nothing" */
mc = curl_multi_poll(multi_handle, NULL, 0, 1000, NULL);

if(mc)
break;
} while(still_running);

curl_multi_cleanup(multi_handle);

/* always cleanup */
curl_easy_cleanup(curl);

/* then cleanup the form */

curl_mime_free(form);

/* free slist */
curl_slist_free_all(headerlist);
}
return 0;
}
for C++ programmers
libcurl provides a C API. C and C++ are similar but not the same. There are a few things to keep in mind
when using libcurl in C++.

Strings are C strings, not C++ string objects

When you pass strings to libcurl's APIs that accept char * that means you cannot pass in C++ strings or
objects to those functions.

For example, if you build a string with C++ and then want that string used as a URL:

std::string url = "https://example.com/foo.asp?name=" + i;

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, url.c_str());

Callback considerations
Since libcurl is a C library, it does not know anything about C++ member functions or objects. You can
overcome this "limitation" with relative ease using for a static member function that is passed a pointer to the
class.

Here's an example of a write callback using a C++ method as callback:

// f is the pointer to your object.

static size_t YourClass::func(void *buffer, size_t sz, size_t n, void *f)
{
// Call non-static member function.
static_cast<YourClass*>(f)->nonStaticFunction();
}

// This is how you pass pointer to the static function:

curl_easy_setopt(hcurl, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, YourClass::func);
curl_easy_setopt(hcurl, CURLOPT_WRITEDATA, this);

HTTP with libcurl

HTTP is by far the most commonly used protocol by libcurl users and libcurl offers countless ways of
modifying such transfers. See the HTTP protocol basics for some basics on how the HTTP protocol works.
HTTPS
Doing HTTPS is typically done the same way as for HTTP as the extra security layer and server verification
etc is done automatically and transparently by default. Just use the https:// scheme in the URL.

HTTPS is HTTP with TLS on top. See also the TLS options section.

HTTP proxy
See using Proxies with libcurl

Sections

HTTP responses
HTTP requests

HTTP versions
HTTP ranges
HTTP authentication

Cookies with libcurl

Download

Upload
Multiplexing
HSTS

HTTP responses

Every HTTP request includes an HTTP response. An HTTP response is a set of metadata and a response
body, where the body can occasionally be zero bytes and thus nonexistent. An HTTP response will however
always have response headers.

Response body
The response body will be passed to the write callback and the response headers to the header callback.

Virtually all libcurl-using applications need to set at least one of those callbacks instructing libcurl what to do
with received headers and data.
Response meta-data
libcurl offers the curl_easy_getinfo() function that allows an application to query libcurl for
information from the previously performed transfer.

Sometimes an application just want to know the size of the data. The size of a response as told by the server
headers can be extracted with curl_easy_getinfo() like this:

curl_off_t size;
curl_easy_getinfo(curl, CURLINFO_CONTENT_LENGTH_DOWNLOAD_T, &size);

If you can wait until after the transfer is already done, which also is a more reliable way since not all URLs
will provide the size up front (like for example for servers that generate content on demand) you can instead
ask for the amount of downloaded data in the most recent transfer.

curl_off_t size;
curl_easy_getinfo(curl, CURLINFO_SIZE_DOWNLOAD_T, &size);

HTTP response code

Every HTTP response starts off with a single line that contains the HTTP response code. It is a three digit
number that contains the server's idea of the status for the request. The numbers are detailed in the HTTP
standard specifications but they are divided into ranges that work like this:

Code Meaning

1xx Transient code, a new one follows

2xx Things are OK

3xx The content is somewhere else

4xx Failed because of a client problem

5xx Failed because of a server problem

You can extract the response code after a transfer like this

long code;
curl_easy_getinfo(curl, CURLINFO_RESPONSE_CODE, &code);
About HTTP response code "errors"
While the response code numbers can include numbers (in the 4xx and 5xx ranges) which the server uses
to signal that there was an error processing the request, it is important to realize that this will not cause
libcurl to return an error.

When libcurl is asked to perform an HTTP transfer it will return an error if that HTTP transfer fails. However,
getting an HTTP 404 or the like back is not a problem for libcurl. It is not an HTTP transfer error. A user might
be writing a client for testing a server's HTTP responses.

If you insist on curl treating HTTP response codes from 400 and up as errors, libcurl offers the
CURLOPT_FAILONERROR option that if set instructs curl to return CURLE_HTTP_RETURNED_ERROR in
this case. It will then return error as soon as possible and not deliver the response body.

HTTP requests

An HTTP request is what curl sends to the server when it tells the server what to do. When it wants to get
data or send data. All transfers involving HTTP start with an HTTP request.

An HTTP request contains a method, a path, HTTP version and a set of request headers. And of course a
libcurl using application can tweak all those fields.

Request method
Every HTTP request contains a "method", sometimes referred to as a "verb". It is usually something like
GET, HEAD, POST or PUT but there are also more esoteric ones like DELETE, PATCH and OPTIONS.

Usually when you use libcurl to set up and perform a transfer the specific request method is implied by the
options you use. If you just ask for a URL, it means the method will be GET while if you set for example
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS that will make libcurl use the POST method. If you set CURLOPT_UPLOAD to
true, libcurl will send a PUT method in its HTTP request and so on. Asking for CURLOPT_NOBODY will
make libcurl use HEAD .

However, sometimes those default HTTP methods are not good enough or simply not the ones you want
your transfer to use. Then you can instruct libcurl to use the specific method you like with
CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST . For example, you want to send a DELETE method to the URL of your
choice:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "DELETE");

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com/file.txt");

The CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST setting should only be the single keyword to use as method in the
HTTP request line. If you want to change or add additional HTTP request headers, see the following
section.
Customize HTTP request headers
When libcurl issues HTTP requests as part of performing the data transfers you have asked it to, it will of
course send them off with a set of HTTP headers that are suitable for fulfilling the task given to it.

If just given the URL http://localhost/file1.txt , libcurl sends the following request to the server:

GET /file1.txt HTTP/1.1

Host: localhost
Accept: */*

If you instruct your application to also set CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS to the string "foobar" (6 letters, the
quotes only used for visual delimiters here), it would send the following headers:

POST /file1.txt HTTP/1.1

Host: localhost
Accept: */*
Content-Length: 6
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

If you are not pleased with the default set of headers libcurl sends, the application has the power to add,
change or remove headers in the HTTP request.

Add a header

To add a header that would not otherwise be in the request, add it with CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER . Suppose
you want a header called Name: that contains Mr. Smith :

struct curl_slist *list = NULL;

list = curl_slist_append(list, "Name: Mr Smith");
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, list);
curl_easy_perform(curl);
curl_slist_free_all(list); /* free the list again */

Change a header

If one of those default headers are not to your satisfaction you can alter them. Like if you think the default
Host: header is wrong (even though it is derived from the URL you give libcurl), you can tell libcurl your
own:

struct curl_slist *list = NULL;

list = curl_slist_append(list, "Host: Alternative");

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, list);
curl_easy_perform(curl);
curl_slist_free_all(list); /* free the list again */
Remove a header

When you think libcurl uses a header in a request that you really think it should not, you can easily tell it to
just remove it from the request. Like if you want to take away the Accept: header. Just provide the header
name with nothing to the right sight of the colon:

struct curl_slist *list = NULL;

list = curl_slist_append(list, "Accept:");
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, list);
curl_easy_perform(curl);
curl_slist_free_all(list); /* free the list again */

Provide a header without contents

As you may then have noticed in the above sections, if you try to add a header with no contents on the right
side of the colon, it will be treated as a removal instruction and it will instead completely inhibit that header
from being sent. If you instead truly want to send a header with zero contents on the right side, you need to
use a special marker. You must provide the header with a semicolon instead of a proper colon. Like
Header; . So if you want to add a header to the outgoing HTTP request that is just Moo: with nothing
following the colon, you could write it like:

struct curl_slist *list = NULL;

list = curl_slist_append(list, "Moo;");
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, list);
curl_easy_perform(curl);
curl_slist_free_all(list); /* free the list again */

Referrer
The Referer: header (yes, it is misspelled) is a standard HTTP header that tells the server from which
URL the user-agent was directed from when it arrived at the URL it now requests. It is a normal header so
you can set it yourself with the CURLOPT_HEADER approach as shown above, or you can use the shortcut
known as CURLOPT_REFERER . Like this:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_REFERER, "https://example.com/fromhere/");

curl_easy_perform(curl);

Automatic referrer

When libcurl is asked to follow redirects itself with the CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION option, and you still
want to have the Referer: header set to the correct previous URL from where it did the redirect, you can
ask libcurl to set that by itself:
 curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1L);
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, 1L);
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com/redirected.cgi");
curl_easy_perform(curl);

HTTP versions

As any other Internet protocol, the HTTP protocol has kept evolving over the years and now there are clients
and servers distributed over the world and over time that speak different versions with varying levels of
success. So in order to get libcurl to work with the URLs you pass in libcurl offers ways for you to specify
which HTTP version that request and transfer should use. libcurl is designed in a way so that it tries to use
the most common, the most sensible if you want, default values first but sometimes that is not enough and
then you may need to instruct libcurl what to do.

Since mid 2016, libcurl defaults to use HTTP/2 for HTTPS servers if you have a libcurl that has HTTP/2
abilities built-in, libcurl will attempt to use HTTP/2 automatically or fall back to 1.1 in case the negotiation
failed. Non-HTTP/2 capable libcurls get 1.1 over HTTPS by default. Plain HTTP requests still default to
HTTP/1.1.

If the default behavior is not good enough for your transfer, the CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION option is there
for you.

Option Description

CURL_HTTP_VERSION_NONE Reset back to default behavior

Enforce use of the legacy HTTP/1.0 protocol

CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_0
version

CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1 Do the request using the HTTP/1.1 protocol versio

CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_0 Attempt to use HTTP/2

Attempt to use HTTP/2 on HTTPS connections

CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2TLS
only, otherwise do HTTP/1.1

Use HTTP/2 straight away without "upgrading"

CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_PRIOR_KNOWLEDG
from 1.1. It requires that you know that this server
E
OK with it.

Use HTTP/3 straight away. It requires that you

CURL_HTTP_VERSION_3
know that this server is OK with it.

Version 2 not mandatory

When asking libcurl to use HTTP/2, it is an ask not a requirement. libcurl will then allow the server to select
to use HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 and that is what decides which protocol that is ultimately used.

Version 3 is mandatory
When asking libcurl to use HTTP/3 with the CURL_HTTP_VERSION_3 option, that makes libcurl use QUIC
to connect to the server and unless the server supports HTTP/3 the transfer will fail - there is no fallback to
earlier versions from this in the way the HTTP/2 option works.

HTTP ranges

What if the client only wants the first 200 bytes out of a remote resource or perhaps 300 bytes somewhere in
the middle? The HTTP protocol allows a client to ask for only a specific data range. The client asks the
server for the specific range with a start offset and an end offset. It can even combine things and ask for
several ranges in the same request by just listing a bunch of pieces next to each other. When a server sends
back multiple independent pieces to answer such a request, you will get them separated with mime
boundary strings and it will be up to the user application to handle that accordingly. curl will not further
separate such a response.

However, a byte range is only a request to the server. It does not have to respect the request and in many
cases, like when the server automatically generates the contents on the fly when it is being asked, it will
simply refuse to do it and it then instead respond with the full contents anyway.

You can make libcurl ask for a range with CURLOPT_RANGE . Like if you want the first 200 bytes out of
something:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_RANGE, "0-199");

Or everything in the file starting from index 200:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_RANGE, "200-");

Get 200 bytes from index 0 and 200 bytes from index 1000:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_RANGE, "0-199,1000-199");

HTTP authentication

libcurl supports a wide variety of HTTP authentication schemes.

Note that this way of authentication is different than the otherwise widely used scheme on the web today
where authentication is performed by an HTTP POST and then keeping state in cookies. See Cookies with
libcurl for details on how to do that

User name and password

libcurl will not try any HTTP authentication without a given user name. Set one like:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_USERNAME, "joe");

and of course most authentications also require a set password that you set separately:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_PASSWORD, "secret");

That is all you need. This will make libcurl switch on its default authentication method for this transfer: HTTP
Basic.

Authentication required
A client does not itself decide that it wants to send an authenticated request. It is something the server
requires. When the server has a resource that is protected and requires authentication, it will respond with a
401 HTTP response and a WWW-Authenticate: header. The header will include details about what
specific authentication methods it accepts for that resource.

Basic
Basic is the default HTTP authentication method and as its name suggests, it is indeed basic. It takes the
name and the password, separates them with a colon and base64 encodes that string before it puts the
entire thing into a Authorization: HTTP header in the request.

If the name and password is set like the examples shown above, the exact outgoing header looks like this:

Authorization: Basic am9lOnNlY3JldA==

This authentication method is totally insecure over HTTP as the credentials will then be sent in plain-text
over the network.

You can explicitly tell libcurl to use Basic method for a specific transfer like this:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);

Digest
Another HTTP authentication method is called Digest. One advantage this method has compared to Basic,
is that it does not send the password over the wire in plain text. This is however an authentication method
that is rarely spoken by browsers and consequently is not a frequently used one.

You can explicitly tell libcurl to use the Digest method for a specific transfer like this (it still needs user name
and password set as well):

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_DIGEST);

NTLM
Another HTTP authentication method is called NTLM.

You can explicitly tell libcurl to use the NTLM method for a specific transfer like this (it still needs user name
and password set as well):

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_NTLM);

Negotiate
Another HTTP authentication method is called Negotiate.

You can explicitly tell libcurl to use the Negotiate method for a specific transfer like this (it still needs user
name and password set as well):

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_NEGOTIATE);

Bearer
To pass on an OAuth 2.0 Bearer Access Token in a request, use CURLOPT_XOAUTH2_BEARER for
example:

CURL *curl = curl_easy_init();

if(curl) {
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "pop3://example.com/");
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_XOAUTH2_BEARER, "1ab9cb22ba269a7");
 ret = curl_easy_perform(curl);
curl_easy_cleanup(curl);
}

Try-first
Some HTTP servers allow one out of several authentication methods, in some cases you will find yourself in
a position where you as a client does not want or is not able to select a single specific method before-hand
and for yet another subset of cases your application does not know if the requested URL even require
authentication or not!

libcurl covers all these situations as well.

You can ask libcurl to use more than one method, and when doing so, you imply that curl first tries the
request without any authentication at all and then based on the HTTP response coming back, it selects one
of the methods that both the server and your application allow. If more than one would work, curl will pick
them in a order based on how secure the methods are considered to be, picking the safest of the available
methods.

Tell libcurl to accept multiple method by bitwise ORing them like this:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC | CURLAUTH_DIGEST);

If you want libcurl to only allow a single specific method but still want it to probe first to check if it can
possibly still make the request without the use of authentication, you can force that behavior by adding
CURLAUTH_ONLY to the bitmask.

Ask to use digest, but nothing else but digest, and only if proven really necessary:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_DIGEST | CURLAUTH_ONLY);

Header API

libcurl offers an API for iterating over all received HTTP headers and for extracting the contents from specific
ones.

When returning header content, libcurl trims leading and trailing whitespace but will not modify or change
content in any other way.

This API was made official and is provided for real starting in libcurl 7.84.0.

Header origins
HTTP headers are key value pairs that are sent from the server in a few different origins during a transfer.
libcurl collects all headers and provides easy access to them for applications.

HTTP headers can arrive as

1. CURLH_HEADER - before regular response content.

2. CURLH_TRAILER - fields arriving after the response content

3. CURLH_CONNECT - response headers in the proxy CONNECT request that might have been done
before the actual server request
4. CURLH_1XX - headers in the potential 1xx HTTP responses that might have preceded the following >=
2xx response code.

5. CURLH_PSEUDO - HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 level headers that start with colon ( : )

Request number
A single HTTP transfer done with libcurl might consist of a series of HTTP requests and the request
argument to the header API functions lets you specify which particular individual request you want the
headers from. 0 being the first request and then the number increases for further redirects or when multi-
state authentication is used. Passing in -1 is a shortcut to the last request in the series, independently of
the actual amount of requests used.

Header folding
HTTP/1 headers supports a deprecated format called "folding", which means that there is a continuation line
after a header, making the line "folded".

The headers API supports folded headers and returns such contents "unfolded" - where the different parts
are separated by a single whitespace character.

When
The two header API function calls are perfectly possible to call at any time during a transfer, both from inside
and outside of callbacks. It is however important to remember that the API will of course only return
information about the state of the headers at the exact moment it is called, which might not be the final status
if you call it while the transfer is still in progress.

Header struct
Get a header
Iterate of headers
Header struct

The header struct pointer the header API functions return, points to memory associated with the easy handle
and subsequent calls to the functions will clobber that struct. Applications need to copy the data if they want
to keep it around. The memory used for the struct gets freed with calling curl_easy_cleanup() .

The struct

struct curl_header {
char *name;
char *value;
size_t amount;
size_t index;
unsigned int origin;
void *anchor;
};

name is the name of header. It will use the casing used for the first instance of the header with this name.

value is the content. It comes exactly as delivered over the network but with leading and trailing whitespace
and newlines stripped off. The data is always null-terminated.

amount is the number of headers using this name that exist, within the asked origin and request context.

index is the zero based entry number of this particular header name, which in case this header was used
more than once in the requested scope can be larger than 0 but is always less than amount.

origin has (exactly) one of the origin bits set, indicating where from the header originates.

anchor is a private handle used by libcurl internals. Do not modify. Do not assume anything about it.

Get a header

CURLHcode curl_easy_header(CURL *easy,

const char *name,
size_t index,
unsigned int origin,
int request,
struct curl_header **hout);

This function returns information about a field with a specific name, and you ask the function to search for it
in one or more origins.
The index argument is when you want to ask for the nth occurrence of a header; when there are more than
one available. Setting index to 0 will of course return the first instance - in many cases that is the only one.

The request argument tells libcurl from which request you want headers from.

An application needs to pass in a pointer to a struct curl_header * in the last argument, as there
will be a pointer returned there when an error is not returned. See Header struct for details on the out result
of a successful call.

If the given name does not match any received header in the given origin, the function returns
CURLHE_MISSING or if no headers at all have been received yet it will return CURLHE_NOHEADERS .

Iterate over headers

struct curl_header *curl_easy_nextheader(CURL *easy,

unsigned int origin,
int request,
struct curl_header *previous);

This function lets the application iterate over all available headers from within the given origins that arrived
in the request.

The request argument tells libcurl from which request you want headers from.

If previous is set to NULL, this function returns a pointer to the first header. The application can then use
that pointer as an argument to the next call to iterate over all available headers within the same origin and
request context.

When this function returns NULL, there are no more headers within the context.

See Header struct for details on the curl_header struct that function this returns a pointer to.

Cookies with libcurl

By default and by design, libcurl makes transfers as basic as possible and features need to be enabled to
get used. One such feature is HTTP cookies, more known as just plain and simply "cookies".

Cookies are name/value pairs sent by the server (using a Set-Cookie: header) to be stored in the client,
and are then supposed to get sent back again in requests that matches the host and path requirements that
were specified along with the cookie when it came from the server (using the Cookie: header). On the
modern web of today, sites are known to sometimes use large numbers of cookies.

Cookie engine
When you enable the "cookie engine" for a specific easy handle, it means that it will record incoming
cookies, store them in the in-memory "cookie store" that is associated with the easy handle and
subsequently send the proper ones back if an HTTP request is made that matches.

There are two ways to switch on the cookie engine:

Enable cookie engine with reading

Ask libcurl to import cookies into the easy handle from a given file name with the CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE
option:

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookies.txt");

A common trick is to just specify a non-existing file name or plain "" to have it just activate the cookie engine
with a blank cookie store to start with.

This option can be set multiple times and then each of the given files will be read.

Enable cookie engine with writing

Ask for received cookies to get stored in a file with the CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR option:

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookies.txt");

when the easy handle is closed later with curl_easy_cleanup() , all known cookies will be written to
the given file. The file format is the well-known "Netscape cookie file" format that browsers also once used.

Setting custom cookies

A simpler and more direct way to just pass on a set of specific cookies in a request that does not add any
cookies to the cookie store and does not even activate the cookie engine, is to set the set with
`CURLOPT_COOKIE:':

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_COOKIE, "name=daniel; present=yes;");

The string you set there is the raw string that would be sent in the HTTP request and should be in the format
of repeated sequences of NAME=VALUE; - including the semicolon separator.

Import export
The cookie in-memory store can hold a bunch of cookies, and libcurl offers very powerful ways for an
application to play with them. You can set new cookies, you can replace an existing cookie and you can
extract existing cookies.

Add a cookie to the cookie store

Add a new cookie to the cookie store by simply passing it into curl with CURLOPT_COOKIELIST with a
new cookie. The format of the input is a single line in the cookie file format, or formatted as a Set-
Cookie: response header, but we recommend the cookie file style:

#define SEP "\t" /* Tab separates the fields */

char *my_cookie =
"example.com" /* Hostname */
SEP "FALSE" /* Include subdomains */
SEP "/" /* Path */
SEP "FALSE" /* Secure */
SEP "0" /* Expiry in epoch time format. 0 == Session */
SEP "foo" /* Name */
SEP "bar"; /* Value */

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_COOKIELIST, my_cookie);

If that given cookie would match an already existing cookie (with the same domain and path, etc.), it would
overwrite the old one with the new contents.

Get all cookies from the cookie store

Sometimes writing the cookie file when you close the handle is not enough and then your application can
opt to extract all the currently known cookies from the store like this:

struct curl_slist *cookies

curl_easy_getinfo(easy, CURLINFO_COOKIELIST, &cookies);

This returns a pointer to a linked list of cookies, and each cookie is (again) specified as a single line of the
cookie file format. The list is allocated for you, so do not forget to call curl_slist_free_all when the
application is done with the information.

Cookie store commands

If setting and extracting cookies is not enough, you can also interfere with the cookie store in more ways:

Wipe the entire in-memory storage clean with:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_COOKIELIST, "ALL");

Erase all session cookies (cookies without expiry date) from memory:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_COOKIELIST, "SESS");

Force a write of all cookies to the file name previously specified with CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR :

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_COOKIELIST, "FLUSH");

Force a reload of cookies from the file name previously specified with CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE :

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_COOKIELIST, "RELOAD");

Cookie file format

The cookie file format is text based and stores one cookie per line. Lines that start with # are treated as
comments.

Each line that each specifies a single cookie consists of seven text fields separated with TAB characters.

Field Example Meaning

0 example.com Domain name

1 FALSE Include subdomains boolean

2 /foobar/ Path

3 FALSE Set over a secure transport

Expires at – seconds since Jan

4 1462299217
1st 1970, or 0

5 person Name of the cookie

6 daniel Value of the cookie

Download

The GET method is the default method libcurl uses when an HTTP URL is requested and no particular other
method is asked for. It asks the server for a particular resource—the standard HTTP download request:

easy = curl_easy_init();
curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_URL, "http://example.com/");
curl_easy_perform(easy);

Since options set in an easy handle are sticky and remain until changed, there may be times when you have
asked for another request method than GET and then want to switch back to GET again for a subsequent
request For this purpose there is the CURLOPT HTTPGET option:

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, 1L);

Download headers too

An HTTP transfer also includes a set of response headers. Response headers are metadata associated
with the actual payload, called the response body. All downloads will get a set of headers too, but when
using libcurl you can select whether you want to have them downloaded (seen) or not.

You can ask libcurl to pass on the headers to the same "stream" as the regular body is, by using
CURLOPT_HEADER :

easy = curl_easy_init();
curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1L);
curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_URL, "http://example.com/");
curl_easy_perform(easy);

Or you can opt to store the headers in a separate download file, by relying on the default behaviors of the
write and header callbacks:

easy = curl_easy_init();
FILE *file = fopen("headers", "wb");
curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_HEADERDATA, file);
curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_URL, "http://example.com/");
curl_easy_perform(easy);
fclose(file);

If you only want to casually browse the headers, you may even be happy enough with just setting verbose
mode while developing as that will show both outgoing and incoming headers sent to stderr:

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1L);

Upload

Uploads over HTTP can be done in many different ways and it is important to notice the differences. They
can use different methods, like POST or PUT, and when using POST the body formatting can differ.

In addition to those HTTP differences, libcurl offers different ways to provide the data to upload.

HTTP POST
POST is typically the HTTP method to pass data to a remote web application. A common way to do that in
browsers is by filling in an HTML form and pressing submit. It is the standard way for an HTTP request to
pass on data to the server. With libcurl you normally provide that data as a pointer and a length:

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, dataptr);

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDSIZE, (long)datalength);

Or you tell libcurl that it is a post but would prefer to have libcurl instead get the data by using the regular
read callback:

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_POST, 1L);

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_READFUNCTION, read_callback);

This "normal" POST will also set the request header Content-Type: application/x-www-form-
urlencoded .

HTTP multipart formposts

A multipart formpost is still using the same HTTP method POST; the difference is only in the formatting of the
request body. A multipart formpost is a series of separate "parts", separated by MIME-style boundary strings.
There is no limit to how many parts you can send.

Each such part has a name, a set of headers and a few other properties.

libcurl offers a set of convenience functions for constructing such a series of parts and to send that off to the
server, all prefixed with curl_mime . Create a multipart post and for each part in the data you set the name,
the data and perhaps additional meta-data. A basic setup might look like this:

/* Create the form */

form = curl_mime_init(curl);

/* Fill in the file upload field */

field = curl_mime_addpart(form);
curl_mime_name(field, "sendfile");
curl_mime_filedata(field, "photo.jpg");

Then you pass that post to libcurl like this:

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_MIMEPOST, form);

( curl_formadd is the former API to build multi-part formposts with but we no longer recommend using
that)
HTTP PUT
A PUT with libcurl will assume you pass the data to it using the read callback, as that is the typical "file
upload" pattern libcurl uses and provides. You set the callback, you ask for PUT (by asking for
CURLOPT_UPLOAD ), you set the size of the upload and you set the URL to the destination:

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_UPLOAD, 1L);

curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_INFILESIZE_LARGE, (curl_off_t) size);
curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_READFUNCTION, read_callback);
curl_easy_setopt(easy, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com/handle/put");

If you for some reason do not know the size of the upload before the transfer starts, and you are using HTTP
1.1 you can add a Transfer-Encoding: chunked header with CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER. For
HTTP 1.0 you must provide the size before hand and for HTTP 2 and later, neither the size nor the extra
header is needed.

Expect: headers
When doing HTTP uploads using HTTP 1.1, libcurl will insert an Expect: 100-continue header in
some circumstances. This header offers the server a way to reject the transfer early and save the client from
having to send a lot of data in vain before the server gets a chance to decline.

The header is added by libcurl if HTTP uploading is done with CURLOPT_UPLOAD or if it is asked to do an
HTTP POST for which the body size is either unknown or known to be larger than 1024 bytes.

A libcurl-using client can explicitly disable the use of the Expect: header with the
CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER option.

This header is not used with HTTP/2 or HTTP/3.

Uploads also downloads

HTTP is a protocol that can respond with contents back even when you upload data to it - it is up to the
server to decide. The response data may even start getting sent back to the client before the upload has
completed.

Multiplexing

The HTTP versions 2 and 3 offer "multiplexing". Using this protocol feature, an HTTP client can do several
concurrent transfers to a server over the same single connection. This feature does not exist in earlier
versions of the HTTP protocol. In earlier HTTP versions, the client would either have to create multiple
connections or do the transfers in a serial manner, one after the other.
libcurl supports HTTP multiplexing for both HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.

Make sure you do multiple transfers using the multi interface to a server that supports HTTP multiplexing.
libcurl can only multiplex transfers when the same host name is used for subsequent transfers.

For all practical purposes and API behaviors, an application does not have to care about if multiplexing is
done or not.

libcurl enables multiplexing by default, but if you start multiple transfers at the same time they will prioritize
short-term speed to a connection so they might then rather open new connections than waiting for a
connection to get created by another transfer to be able to multiplex over. To tell libcurl to prioritize
multiplexing, set the CURLOPT_PIPEWAIT option for the transfer with curl_easy_setopt() .

With curl_multi_setopt() 's option CURLMOPT_PIPELINING , you can disable multiplexing for a
specific multi handle.

HSTS

HSTS is short for HTTP Strict-Transport-Security. It is a defined way for a server to tell a client that the client
should prefer to use HTTPS with that site for a specified period of time into the future.

Here is how you use HSTS with libcurl.

In-memory cache
libcurl primarily features an in-memory cache for HSTS hosts, so that subsequent HTTP-only requests to a
host name present in the cache will get internally "redirected" to the HTTPS version. Assuming you have
this feature enabled.

Enable HSTS for a handle

HSTS is enabled by setting the correct bitmask using the CURLOPT_HSTS_CTRL option with
curl_easy_setopt() . The bitmask has two separate flags that can be used, but CURLHSTS_ENABLE
is the primary one. If that is set, then this easy handle how has HSTS support enabled.

The second flag available for this option is CURLHSTS_READONLYFILE , which if set, tells libcurl that the
file name you specify for it to use as a HSTS cache is only to be read from, and not write anything back to.

Set a HSTS cache file

If you want to persist the HSTS cache on disk, then set a file name with the CURLOPT_HSTS option. libcurl
will read from this file at start of a transfer and write to it (unless it was set read-only) when the easy handle
is closed.

alt-svc

Alternative Services, aka alt-svc, is an HTTP header that lets a server tell the client that there is one or more
alternatives for that server at "another place" with the use of the Alt-Svc: response header.

The alternatives the server suggests can include a server running on another port on the same host, on
another completely different host name and it can also offer the service over another protocol.

Enable
To make libcurl consider any offered alternatives by serves, you must first enable it in the handle. You do this
by setting the correct bitmask to the CURLOPT_ALTSVC_CTRL option. The bitmask allows the application
to limit what HTTP versions to allow, and if the "cache" file on disk should only be used to read from (not
write).

Enable alt-svc and allow it to switch to either HTTP/1 or HTTP/2:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_ALTSVC_CTRL, CURLALTSVC_H1|CURLALTSVC_H2);

Tell libcurl to use a specific alt-svc cache file like this:

curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_ALTSVC, "altsvc-cache.txt");

libcurl holds the list of alternatives in a memory-based cache, but will load all already existing alternative
service entries from the alt-svc file at start-up and consider those when doing its subsequent HTTP requests.
If servers responds with new or updated Alt-Svc: headers, libcurl will store those in the cache file at exit
(unless the CURLALTSVC_READONLYFILE bit was set).

The alt-svc cache

The alt-svc cache is similar to a cookie jar. It is a text based file that stores one alternative per line and each
entry also has an expiry time for which duration that particular alternative is valid.

HTTPS only
Alt-Svc: is only trusted and parsed from servers when connected to over HTTPS.
HTTP/3
The use of Alt-Svc: headers is as of March 2022 still the only defined way to bootstrap a client and
server into using HTTP/3. The server then hints to the client over HTTP/1 or HTTP/2 that it also is available
over HTTP/3 and then curl can connect to it using HTTP/3 in the subsequent request if the alt-svc cache
says so.

Bindings

Creative people have written bindings or interfaces for various environments and programming languages.
Using one of these allows you to take advantage of the power of curl from within your favorite language or
system. This is a list of all known interfaces, as of the time of this writing.

The bindings listed below are not part of the curl/libcurl distribution archives. They must be downloaded and
installed separately.

Language Site Author(s)

Script Basic ​
https://scriptbasic.com/​ Peter Verhas

C++ ​
http://curlpp.org/​ Jean-Philippe, Barrette-LaPier

​
C++ https://github.com/JosephP91/cu Giuseppe Persico
rlcpp​

C++ ​
https://github.com/libcpr/cpr​ Huu Nguyen

Stephen Nestinger, Jonathan

Ch/C++ ​
https://chcurl.sourceforge.io/​
Rogado

​https://github.com/biasedbit/BBHTTP
Cocoa (BBHTTP) Bruno de Carvalho
​

​https://github.com/karelia/curlhandle/
Cocoa (CURLHandle) Dan Wood
​

Clojure ​
https://github.com/lsevero/clj-curl ​ Lucas Severo

​
D https://dlang.org/library/std/net/c Kenneth Bogert
url.html​

​
Delphi https://github.com/Mercury13/cur Mikhail Merkuryev
l4delphi​
Dylan ​
https://opendylan.org/​ Chris Double

​
https://iron.eiffel.com/repository/
Eiffel 20.11/package/ABEF6975- Eiffel Software
37AC-45FD-9C67-
52D10BA0669B​

​
https://github.com/puzza007/katipo
Erlang Paul Oliver
​

Falcon ​
http://www.falconpl.org/​ Falcon

Gambas ​
https://gambas.sourceforge.io/​ Gambas

glib/GTK+ ​
http://atterer.org/glibcurl ​ Richard Atterer

Go ​
https://github.com/andelf/go-curl ​ ShuYu Wang

​
Guile http://www.lonelycactus.com/guil Michael L. Gran
e-curl.html​

​
https://github.com/vszakats/harb
Harbour Viktor Szakáts
our-
core/tree/master/contrib/hbcurl​

​
Haskell https://hackage.haskell.org/pack Galois, Inc
age/curl​

​https://github.com/pjlegato/curl-
Java Paul Legato
java​

​
Julia https://github.com/JuliaWeb/Lib Amit Murthy
CURL.jl​

​https://common-
Lisp Liam Healy
lisp.net/project/cl-curl/​

Lua (luacurl) ​
http://luacurl.luaforge.net/​ Alexander Marinov

​https://github.com/Lua- Jürgen Hötzel, Alexey

Lua-cURL
cURL/Lua-cURLv3​ Melnichuk

​
Masroor Ehsan Choudhury,
.NET https://github.com/masroore/Curl
Jeffrey Phillips
Sharp​

​https://nimble.directory/pkg/libcurl
Nim Andreas Rumpf
​
 ​https://github.com/JCMais/node-
NodeJS Jonathan Cardoso Machado
libcurl​

OCaml ​
https://ygrek.org/p/ocurl/​ Lars Nilsson

​
https://curlpas.sourceforge.io/curlpas/
Pascal/Delphi/Kylix Jeffrey Pohlmeyer.
​

​
Perl https://github.com/szbalint/WW Cris Bailiff and Bálint Szilakszi
W--Curl​

​https://metacpan.org/pod/Net::Curl
Perl Przemyslaw Iskra
​

​
Perl6 https://github.com/azawawi/perl6 Ahmad M. Zawawi
-net-curl​

PHP ​
https://php.net/curl ​ Sterling Hughes

​
PostgreSQL https://github.com/pramsey/pgsq Paul Ramsey
l-http​

​
https://github.com/RekGRpth/pg_curl
PostgreSQL RekGRpth
​

​
PureBasic https://www.purebasic.com/docu PureBasic
mentation/http/​

Python (PycURL) ​
https://github.com/pycurl/pycurl ​ Kjetil Jacobsen

​https://cran.r- Jeroen Ooms, Hadley Wickham

R
project.org/package=curl​ RStudio

Rexx ​
https://rexxcurl.sourceforge.io/​ Mark Hessling

​https://ring-
Ring lang.sourceforge.io/doc1.3/libcur Mahmoud Fayed
l.html​

​
https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/
RPG Patrick Monnerat
master/packages/OS400/READ
ME.OS400​

Ruby (curb) ​
https://github.com/taf2/curb ​ Ross Bamford

​https://github.com/kball/curl_multi.rb Kristjan Petursson and Keith

Ruby (ruby-curl-multi)
​ Rarick
 ​
Rust (curl-rust) Carl Lerche
https://github.com/alexcrichton/c
url-rust​
​
Scheme Bigloo https://www.metapaper.net/lisovs Kirill Lisovsky
ky/web/curl/​

​
Scilab https://help.scilab.org/docs/curre Sylvestre Ledru
nt/fr_FR/getURL.html​

​
S-Lang https://www.jedsoft.org/slang/mo John E Davis
dules/curl.html​

​
Smalltalk https://www.squeaksource.com/ Danil Osipchuk
CurlPlugin/​

​
https://sourceforge.net/p/spf/spf/c
SP-Forth Andrey Cherezov
i/master/tree/devel/~ac/lib/lin/cur
l/​

Tcl ​
http://mirror.yellow5.com/tclcurl/​ Andrés García

​
Visual Basic https://sourceforge.net/projects/li Jeffrey Phillips
bcurl-vb/​

​
wxWidgets https://wxcode.sourceforge.io/co Casey O'Donnell
mponents/wxcurl/​

​https://github.com/charonn0/RB-
Xojo Andrew Lambert
libcURL​

​ ​

libcurl internals

libcurl is never finished and is not just an off-the-shelf product. It is a living project that is improved and
modified on almost a daily basis. We depend on skilled and interested hackers to fix bugs and to add
features.

This chapter is meant to describe internal details to aid keen libcurl hackers to learn some basic concepts
on how libcurl works internally and thus possibly where to look for problems or where to add things when
you want to make the library do something new.
 Easy handles and connections

Everything is multi

State machines

Protocol handler
Backends

Windows vs Unix

Memory debugging

Content Encoding

Structs

Resolving host names

Tests

Easy handles and connections

When reading the source code there are some useful basics that are good to know and keep in mind:

'data' is the variable name we use all over to refer to the easy handle ( struct Curl_easy ) for the
transfer being worked on. No other name should be used for this and nothing else should use this name.
The easy handle is the main object identifying a transfer. A transfer typically uses a connection at some
point and typically only one at a time. There is a data->conn pointer that identifies the connection
that is currently used by this transfer. A single connection can be used over time and even concurrently
by several transfers (and thus easy handles) when multiplexed connections are used.

conn is the variable name we use all over the internals to refer to the current connection the code
works on ( struct connectdata ).

result is the usual name we use for a CURLcode variable to hold the return values from functions
and if that return value is different than zero, it is an error and the function should clean up and return
(usually passing on the same error code to its parent function).

Everything is multi

libcurl offers a few different APIs to do transfers; where the primary differences are the synchronous easy
interface versus the non-blocking multi interface. The multi interface itself can then be further used either by
using the event-driven socket interface or the "normal" perform interface.

Internally however, everything is written for the event-driven interface. Everything needs to be written in non-
blocking fashion so that functions are never waiting for data in loop or similar. Unless they are the "surface"
functions that have that expressed functionality.

The function curl_easy_perform() which performs a single transfer synchronously, is itself just a
wrapper function that internally will setup and use the multi interface itself.

State machines

To facilitate non-blocking behavior all through, the curl source is full of state machines. Work on as much
data as there is and drive the state machine to where it can go based on what's available and allow the
functions to continue from that point later on when more data arrives that then might drive the state machine
further.

There are such states in many different levels for a given transfer and the code for each particular protocol
may have its own set of state machines.

mstate
One of the primary states is the main transfer "mode" the easy handle holds, which says if the current
transfer is resolving, waiting for a resolve, connecting, waiting for a connect, issuing a request, doing a
transfer etc (see the CURLMstate enum in lib/multihandle.h ). Every transfer done with libcurl has
an associated easy handle and every easy handle will exercise that state machine.

The image below shows all states and possible state transitions. See further explanation below.

libcurl transfer state machine

All transfers start in INIT and they end in MSGSENT

yellow: the initial setting-up states

blue: resolving names and setting up the connection
green: initiating and setting up the transfer

white: the transfer

red: post-transfer

All states within the striped area have an associated connection.

Protocol handler

libcurl is a multi-protocol transfer library. The core of the code is a set of generic functions that are used for
transfers in general and will mostly work the same for all protocols. The main state machine described
above for example is there and works for all protocols - even though some protocols may not make use of all
states for all transfers.

However, each different protocol libcurl speaks also has its unique particularities and specialties. In order to
not have the code littered with conditions in the style "if the protocol is XYZ, then do…", we instead have the
concept of Curl_handler . Each supported protocol defines one of those in lib/url.c there is an
array of pointers to such handlers called protocols[] .

When a transfer is about to be done, libcurl parses the URL it is about to operate on and among other things
it figures out what protocol to use. Normally this can be done by looking at the scheme part of the URL. For
https://example.com that is https and for imaps://example.com it is imaps . Using the
provided scheme, libcurl sets the conn->handler pointer to the handler struct for the protocol that
handles this URL.

libcurl protocol handlers

The handler struct contains a set of function pointers that can be NULL or set to point to a protocol specific
function to do things necessary for that protocol to work for a transfer. Things that not all other protocols
need The handler struct also sets up the name of the protocol and describes its feature set with a bitmask
A libcurl transfer is built around a set of different "actions" and the handler can extend each of them. Here
are some example function pointers in this struct and how they are used:

Setup connection
If a connection cannot be reused for a transfer, it needs to setup a connection to the host given in the URL
and when it does, it can also call the protocol handler's function for it. Like this:

if(conn->handler->setup_connection)
result = conn->handler->setup_connection(data, conn);

Connect
After a connection has been established, this function gets called

if(conn->handler->connect_it)
result = conn->handler->connect_it(data, &done);

Do
"Do" is simply the action that issues a request for the particular resource the URL identifies. All protocol has
a do action so this function must be provided:

result = conn->handler->do_it(data, &done);

Done
When a transfer is completed, the "done" action is taken:

result = conn->handler->done(data, status, premature);

Disconnect
The connection is about to be taken down.

result = conn->handler->disconnect(data, conn, dead_connection);

Backends

A backend in curl is a build-time selectable alternative implementation.

When you build curl, you can select alternative implementations for several different things. Different
providers of the same feature set. You select which backend or backends (plural) to use when you build curl.

Backends are selectable and deselectable

Often platform dependent

Can differ in features

Can differ in 3rd party licenses
Can differ in maturity

The internal APIs are never exposed externally

Different backends
In the libcurl source code, there are internal APIs for providing functionality. In these different areas there are
multiple different providers:

1. IDN
2. Name resolving
3. TLS

4. SSH

5. HTTP/1 and HTTP/2

6. HTTP/3
7. HTTP content encoding

Backends visualized
 libcurl backends

Applications (in the upper yellow cloud) access libcurl through the public API. The API is fixed and stable.

Internally, the "core" of libcurl uses internal APIs to perform the different duties it needs to do. Each of these
internal APIs are powered by alternative implementations, in many times powered by different third party
libraries.

The image above shows the different third party libraries powering different internal APIs. The purple boxes
are "one or more" and the dark gray ones are "one of these".

Windows vs Unix

There are a few differences in how to program curl the Unix way compared to the Windows way. Perhaps
the four most notable details are:

Different function names for socket operations

In curl, this is solved with defines and macros, so that the source looks the same in all places except for the
header file that defines them. The macros in use are sclose() , sread() and swrite() .

Init calls
Windows requires a couple of init calls for the socket stuff.

That is taken care of by the curl_global_init() call, but if other libs also do it etc there might be
reasons for applications to alter that behavior
We require WinSock version 2.2 and load this version during global init.

File descriptors
File descriptors for network communication and file operations are not as easily interchangeable as in Unix.

We avoid this by not trying any funny tricks on file descriptors.

Stdout
When writing data to stdout, Windows makes end-of-lines the DOS way, thus destroying binary data,
although you do want that conversion if it is text coming through... (sigh)

We set stdout to binary under windows

Ifdefs
Inside the source code, We make an effort to avoid #ifdef [Your OS] . All conditionals that deal with
features should instead be in the format #ifdef HAVE_THAT_WEIRD_FUNCTION . Since Windows
cannot run configure scripts, we maintain a curl_config-win32.h file in the lib directory that is
supposed to look exactly like a curl_config.h file would have looked like on a Windows machine.

Generally speaking: curl is frequently compiled on several dozens of operating systems. Do not walk on the
edge.

Memory debugging

The file lib/memdebug.c contains debug-versions of a few functions. Functions such as malloc() ,
free() , fopen() , fclose() , etc that somehow deal with resources that might give us problems if we
"leak" them. The functions in the memdebug system do nothing fancy, they do their normal function and then
log information about what they just did. The logged data can then be analyzed after a complete session,

memanalyze.pl is the perl script present in tests/ that analyzes a log file generated by the memory
tracking system. It detects if resources are allocated but never freed and other kinds of errors related to
resource management.

Internally, the definition of the preprocessor symbol DEBUGBUILD restricts code which is only compiled for
debug enabled builds. And symbol CURLDEBUG is used to differentiate code which is only used for
memory tracking/debugging.

Use -DCURLDEBUG when compiling to enable memory debugging, this is also switched on by running
configure with --enable-curldebug . Use -DDEBUGBUILD when compiling to enable a debug build
or run configure with --enable-debug .

curl --version will list 'Debug' feature for debug enabled builds, and will list 'TrackMemory' feature for
curl debug memory tracking capable builds. These features are independent and can be controlled when
running the configure script. When --enable-debug is given both features will be enabled, unless some
restriction prevents memory tracking from being used.

Track Down Memory Leaks

... using the memory debug system. In general, we suggest using valgrind a the first choice.

Single-threaded

Please note that this memory leak system is not adjusted to work in more than one thread. If you want/need
to use it in a multi-threaded app. Please adjust accordingly.

Build

Rebuild libcurl with -DCURLDEBUG (usually, rerunning configure with --enable-debug fixes this).
make clean first, then make so that all files are actually rebuilt properly. It will also make sense to build
libcurl with the debug option (usually -g to the compiler) so that debugging it will be easier if you actually
do find a leak in the library.

This will create a library that has memory debugging enabled.

Modify Your Application

Add a line in your application code:

curl_dbg_memdebug("dump");

This will make the malloc debug system output a full trace of all resources using functions to the given file
name. Make sure you rebuild your program and that you link with the same libcurl you built for this purpose
as described above.

Run Your Application

Run your program as usual. Watch the specified memory trace file grow.

Make your program exit and use the proper libcurl cleanup functions etc. So that all non-leaks are
returned/freed properly.

Analyze the Flow

Use the tests/memanalyze.pl perl script to analyze the dump file:

 tests/memanalyze.pl dump

This now outputs a report on what resources that were allocated but never freed etc. This report is fine for
posting to the list.

If this does not produce any output, no leak was detected in libcurl. Then the leak is mostly likely to be in
your code.

Content Encoding

About content encodings

[HTTP/1.1][4] specifies that a client may request that a server encode its response. This is usually used to
compress a response using one (or more) encodings from a set of commonly available compression
techniques. These schemes include deflate (the zlib algorithm), gzip , br (brotli) and compress . A
client requests that the server perform an encoding by including an Accept-Encoding header in the
request document. The value of the header should be one of the recognized tokens deflate , ... (there's a
way to register new schemes/tokens, see sec 3.5 of the spec). A server MAY honor the client's encoding
request. When a response is encoded, the server includes a Content-Encoding header in the
response. The value of the Content-Encoding header indicates which encodings were used to encode
the data, in the order in which they were applied.

It's also possible for a client to attach priorities to different schemes so that the server knows which it prefers.
See sec 14.3 of RFC 2616 for more information on the Accept-Encoding header. See sec 3.1.2.2 of
RFC 7231 for more information on the Content-Encoding header.

Supported content encodings

The deflate , gzip , zstd and br content encodings are supported by libcurl. Both regular and
chunked transfers work fine. The zlib library is required for the deflate and gzip encodings, the brotli
decoding library is for the br encoding and not too surprisingly libzstd does zstd .

The libcurl interface

To cause libcurl to request a content encoding use:

[ curl_easy_setopt ][1](curl, [ CURLOPT_ACCEPT_ENCODING ][5], string)

where string is the intended value of the Accept-Encoding header.

Currently, libcurl does support multiple encodings but only understands how to process responses that use
the deflate , gzip , zstd and/or br content encodings, so the only values for
[ CURLOPT_ACCEPT_ENCODING ][5] that will work (besides identity , which does nothing) are
deflate , gzip , zstd and br . If a response is encoded using the compress or methods, libcurl will
return an error indicating that the response could not be decoded. If <string> is NULL no Accept-
Encoding header is generated. If <string> is a zero-length string, then an Accept-Encoding
header containing all supported encodings will be generated
The [ CURLOPT_ACCEPT_ENCODING ][5] must be set to any non-NULL value for content to be
automatically decoded. If it is not set and the server still sends encoded content (despite not having been
asked), the data is returned in its raw form and the Content-Encoding type is not checked.

The curl interface

Use the [ --compressed ][6] option with curl to cause it to ask servers to compress responses using any
format supported by curl.

Structs

This section documents internal structs. Since they are truly internal, we can and will change them
occasionally which might make this section slightly out of date at times.

Curl_easy
The Curl_easy struct is the one returned to the outside in the external API as an opaque CURL * . This
pointer is usually known as an easy handle in API documentations and examples.

Information and state that is related to the actual connection is in the connectdata struct. When a transfer
is about to be made, libcurl will either create a new connection or re-use an existing one. The current
connectdata that is used by this handle is pointed out by Curl_easy->conn .

Data and information that regard this particular single transfer is put in the SingleRequest sub-struct.

When the Curl_easy struct is added to a multi handle, as it must be in order to do any transfer, the -
>multi member will point to the Curl_multi struct it belongs to. The ->prev and ->next members
will then be used by the multi code to keep a linked list of Curl_easy structs that are added to that same
multi handle. libcurl always uses multi so ->multi will point to a Curl_multi when a transfer is in
progress.

->mstate is the multi state of this particular Curl_easy . When multi_runsingle() is called, it
will act on this handle according to which state it is in. The mstate is also what tells which sockets to return
for a specific Curl_easy when [ curl_multi_fdset() ][12] is called etc.

The libcurl source code generally use the name data everywhere for the local variable that points to the
Curl_easy struct.
When doing multiplexed HTTP/2 transfers, each Curl_easy is associated with an individual stream,
sharing the same connectdata struct. Multiplexing makes it even more important to keep things associated
with the right thing!

connectdata
A general idea in libcurl is to keep connections around in a connection "cache" after they have been used in
case they will be used again and then re-use an existing one instead of creating a new one as it creates a
significant performance boost.

Each connectdata struct identifies a single physical connection to a server. If the connection cannot be
kept alive, the connection will be closed after use and then this struct can be removed from the cache and
freed.

Thus, the same Curl_easy can be used multiple times and each time select another connectdata
struct to use for the connection. Keep this in mind, as it is then important to consider if options or choices are
based on the connection or the Curl_easy .

As a special complexity, some protocols supported by libcurl require a special disconnect procedure that is
more than just shutting down the socket. It can involve sending one or more commands to the server before
doing so. Since connections are kept in the connection cache after use, the original Curl_easy may no
longer be around when the time comes to shut down a particular connection. For this purpose, libcurl holds
a special dummy closure_handle Curl_easy in the Curl_multi struct to use when needed.

FTP uses two TCP connections for a typical transfer but it keeps both in this single struct and thus can be
considered a single connection for most internal concerns.

The libcurl source code generally uses the name conn for the local variable that points to the connectdata.

Curl_multi
Internally, the easy interface is implemented as a wrapper around multi interface functions. This makes
everything multi interface.

Curl_multi is the multi handle struct exposed as the opaque CURLM * in external APIs.

This struct holds a list of Curl_easy structs that have been added to this handle with
[ curl_multi_add_handle() ][13]. The start of the list is ->easyp and ->num_easy is a counter of
added Curl_easy s.

->msglist is a linked list of messages to send back when [ curl_multi_info_read() ][14] is called.
Basically a node is added to that list when an individual Curl_easy 's transfer has completed.

->hostcache points to the name cache. It is a hash table for looking up name to IP. The nodes have a
limited lifetime in there and this cache is meant to reduce the time for when the same name is wanted within
a short period of time.

->timetree points to a tree of Curl_easy s, sorted by the remaining time until it should be checked -
normally some sort of timeout. Each Curl_easy has one node in the tree.

->sockhash is a hash table to allow fast lookups of socket descriptor for which Curl_easy uses that
descriptor. This is necessary for the multi_socket API.

->conn_cache points to the connection cache. It keeps track of all connections that are kept after use.
The cache has a maximum size.

->closure_handle is described in the connectdata section.

The libcurl source code generally uses the name multi for the variable that points to the Curl_multi
struct.

Curl_handler
Each unique protocol that is supported by libcurl needs to provide at least one Curl_handler struct. It
defines what the protocol is called and what functions the main code should call to deal with protocol
specific issues. In general, there's a source file named [protocol].c in which there's a struct
Curl_handler Curl_handler_[protocol] declared. In url.c there's then the main array with all
individual Curl_handler structs pointed to from a single array which is scanned through when a URL is
given to libcurl to work with.

The concrete function pointer prototypes can be found in lib/urldata.h .

->scheme is the URL scheme name, usually spelled out in uppercase. That is "HTTP" or "FTP" etc.
SSL versions of the protocol need their own Curl_handler setup so HTTPS separate from HTTP.

->setup_connection is called to allow the protocol code to allocate protocol specific data that then
gets associated with that Curl_easy for the rest of this transfer. It gets freed again at the end of the
transfer. It will be called before the connectdata for the transfer has been selected/created. Most
protocols will allocate its private struct [PROTOCOL] here and assign Curl_easy->req.p.
[protocol] to it.

->connect_it allows a protocol to do some specific actions after the TCP connect is done, that can
still be considered part of the connection phase. Some protocols will alter the connectdata-
>recv[] and connectdata->send[] function pointers in this function.

->connecting is similarly a function that keeps getting called as long as the protocol considers itself
still in the connecting phase.

->do_it is the function called to issue the transfer request. What we call the DO action internally. If
the DO is not enough and things need to be kept getting done for the entire DO sequence to complete,
->doing is then usually also provided. Each protocol that needs to do multiple commands or similar
for do/doing needs to implement their own state machines (see SCP, SFTP, FTP). Some protocols (only
FTP and only due to historical reasons) have a separate piece of the DO state called DO_MORE .
 ->doing keeps getting called while issuing the transfer request command(s)
->done gets called when the transfer is complete and DONE. That is after the main data has been
transferred.

->do_more gets called during the DO_MORE state. The FTP protocol uses this state when setting up
the second connection.

->proto_getsock , ->doing_getsock , ->domore_getsock , ->perform_getsock

Functions that return socket information. Which socket(s) to wait for which I/O action(s) during the
particular multi state.

->disconnect is called immediately before the TCP connection is shutdown.

->readwrite gets called during transfer to allow the protocol to do extra reads/writes

->attach attaches a transfer to the connection.

->defport is the default report TCP or UDP port this protocol uses

->protocol is one or more bits in the CURLPROTO_* set. The SSL versions have their "base"
protocol set and then the SSL variation. Like "HTTP|HTTPS".

->flags is a bitmask with additional information about the protocol that will make it get treated
differently by the generic engine:
PROTOPT_SSL - will make it connect and negotiate SSL

PROTOPT_DUAL - this protocol uses two connections

PROTOPT_CLOSEACTION - this protocol has actions to do before closing the connection. This flag
is no longer used by code, yet still set for a bunch of protocol handlers.

PROTOPT_DIRLOCK - "direction lock". The SSH protocols set this bit to limit which "direction" of
socket actions that the main engine will concern itself with.

PROTOPT_NONETWORK - a protocol that does not use the network (read file: )

PROTOPT_NEEDSPWD - this protocol needs a password and will use a default one unless one is
provided

PROTOPT_NOURLQUERY - this protocol cannot handle a query part on the URL (?foo=bar)

conncache
Is a hash table with connections for later re-use. Each Curl_easy has a pointer to its connection cache.
Each multi handle sets up a connection cache that all added Curl_easy s share by default.

Curl_share
The libcurl share API allocates a Curl_share struct, exposed to the external API as CURLSH * .

The idea is that the struct can have a set of its own versions of caches and pools and then by providing this
struct in the CURLOPT_SHARE option, those specific Curl_easy s will use the caches/pools that this
share handle holds.
Then individual Curl_easy structs can be made to share specific things that they otherwise would not,
such as cookies.

The Curl_share struct can currently hold cookies, DNS cache and the SSL session cache.

CookieInfo
This is the main cookie struct. It holds all known cookies and related information. Each Curl_easy has its
own private CookieInfo even when they are added to a multi handle. They can be made to share
cookies by using the share API.

Resolving host names

Aka hostip.c explained

The main compile-time defines to keep in mind when reading the host*.c source file are these:

CURLRES_IPV6
this host has getaddrinfo() and family, and thus we use that. The host may not be able to resolve IPv6,
but we do not really have to take that into account. Hosts that are not IPv6-enabled have CURLRES_IPV4
defined.

CURLRES_ARES
is defined if libcurl is built to use c-ares for asynchronous name resolves. This can be Windows or *nix.

CURLRES_THREADED
is defined if libcurl is built to use threading for asynchronous name resolves. The name resolve will be done
in a new thread, and the supported asynch API will be the same as for ares-builds. This is the default under
(native) Windows.

If any of the two previous are defined, CURLRES_ASYNCH is defined too. If libcurl is not built to use an
asynchronous resolver, CURLRES_SYNCH is defined.
host*.c sources
The host*.c sources files are split up like this:

hostip.c - method-independent resolver functions and utility functions

hostasyn.c - functions for asynchronous name resolves

hostsyn.c - functions for synchronous name resolves

asyn-ares.c - functions for asynchronous name resolves using c-ares

asyn-thread.c - functions for asynchronous name resolves using threads

hostip4.c - IPv4 specific functions

hostip6.c - IPv6 specific functions

The hostip.h is the single united header file for all this. It defines the CURLRES_* defines based on the
config*.h and curl_setup.h defines.

Tests

The curl test suite is a fundamental cornerstone in our development process. It helps us verify that existing
functionality is still there like before, and we use it to check that new functionality behaves as expected.

With every bugfix and new feature, we ideally also create one or more test cases.

The test suite is custom made and tailored specifically for our own purposes to allow us to test curl from
every possible angle that we think we need. It does not rely on any third party test frameworks.

The tests are meant to be possible to build and run on virtually all platforms available.

Test file format

Build tests
Run tests
Debug builds

Test servers
curl tests
libcurl tests
Unit tests

Valgrind
Continuous Integration
Autobuilds
Torture
Test file format

Test file format

Each curl test is designed in a single text file using an XML-like format.

Labels mark the beginning and the end of all sections, and each label must be written in its own line.
Comments are either XML-style (enclosed with <!-- and --> ) or shell script style (beginning with # )
and must appear on their own lines and not alongside actual test data. Most test data files are syntactically
valid XML, although a few files are not (lack of support for character entities and the preservation of carriage
return and linefeed characters at the end of lines are the biggest differences).

All tests must begin with a <testcase> tag, which encompasses the remainder of the file. See below for
other tags.

Each test file is called tests/data/testNUMBER where NUMBER is a unique numerical test identifier.
Each test has to use its own dedicated number. The number has no meaning other than identifying the test.

The test file defines exactly what command line or tool to run, what test servers to invoke and how they
should respond, exactly what protocol exchange that should happen, what output and return code to expect
and much more.

Everything is written within their dedicated tags like this when the name is set:

<name>
HTTP with host name written backwards
</name>

keywords

Every test has one or more <keywords> set in the top of the file. They are meant to be "tags" that identify
features and protocols that are tested by this test case. runtests.pl can be made to run only tests that
match (or do not match) such keywords.

Preprocessed

Under the hood, each test input file is preprocessed at startup by runtests.pl . This means that
variables, macros and keywords are expanded and a temporary version of the file is stored in
tests/log/testNUMBER - and that file is then used by all the test servers etc.

This processing allows the test format to offer features like %repeat to create really big test files without
bloating the input files correspondingly.

Base64 Encoding

In the preprocess stage, a special instruction can be used to have runtests.pl base64 encode a certain
section and insert in the generated output file. This is in particular good for test cases where the test tool is
expected to pass in base64 encoded content that might use dynamic information that is unique for this
particular test invocation, like the server port number.
To insert a base64 encoded string into the output, use this syntax:

%b64[ data to encode ]b64%

The data to encode can then use any of the existing variables mentioned below, or even percent-encoded
individual bytes. As an example, insert the HTTP server's port number (in ASCII) followed by a space and
the hexadecimal byte 9a:

%b64[%HTTPPORT %9a]b64%

Hexadecimal decoding

In the preprocess stage, a special instruction can be used to have runtests.pl generate a sequence of binary
bytes.

To insert a sequence of bytes from a hex encoded string, use this syntax:

%hex[ %XX-encoded data to decode ]hex%

For example, to insert the binary octets 0, 1 and 255 into the test file:

%hex[ %00%01%FF ]hex%

Repeat content

In the preprocess stage, a special instruction can be used to have runtests.pl generate a repetitive sequence
of bytes.

To insert a sequence of repeat bytes, use this syntax to make the <string> get repeated <number> of
times. The number has to be 1 or larger and the string may contain %HH hexadecimal codes:

%repeat[<number> x <string>]%

For example, to insert the word hello a 100 times:

%repeat[100 x hello]%

Conditional lines

Lines in the test file can be made to appear conditionally on a specific feature (see the "features" section
below) being set or not set. If the specific feature is present, the following lines will be output, otherwise it
outputs nothing, until a following else or endif clause. Like this:

%if brotli
Accept-Encoding
%endif

It can also check for the inverse condition, so if the feature is not set by the use of an exclamation mark:

%if !brotli
Accept-Encoding: not-brotli
%endif

You can also make an "else" clause to get output for the opposite condition, like:

%if brotli
Accept-Encoding: brotli
%else
Accept-Encoding: nothing
%endif

Note that there can be no nested conditions. You can only do one conditional at a time and you can only
check for a single feature in it.

Variables

When the test is preprocessed, a range of "variables" in the test file will be replaced by their content at that
time.

Available substitute variables include:

%CLIENT6IP - IPv6 address of the client running curl

%CLIENTIP - IPv4 address of the client running curl

%CURL - Path to the curl executable

%FILE_PWD - Current directory, on windows prefixed with a slash

%FTP6PORT - IPv6 port number of the FTP server

%FTPPORT - Port number of the FTP server

%FTPSPORT - Port number of the FTPS server

%FTPTIME2 - Timeout in seconds that should be just sufficient to receive a response from the test FTP
server

%FTPTIME3 - Even longer than %FTPTIME2

%GOPHER6PORT - IPv6 port number of the Gopher server

%GOPHERPORT - Port number of the Gopher server

%GOPHERSPORT - Port number of the Gophers server

%HOST6IP - IPv6 address of the host running this test
%HOSTIP - IPv4 address of the host running this test

%HTTP6PORT - IPv6 port number of the HTTP server

%HTTPPORT - Port number of the HTTP server

%HTTP2PORT - Port number of the HTTP/2 server

%HTTPSPORT - Port number of the HTTPS server

%HTTPSPROXYPORT - Port number of the HTTPS-proxy

%HTTPTLS6PORT - IPv6 port number of the HTTP TLS server

%HTTPTLSPORT - Port number of the HTTP TLS server

%HTTPUNIXPATH - Path to the Unix socket of the HTTP server

%SOCKSUNIXPATH - Absolute Path to the Unix socket of the SOCKS server

%IMAP6PORT - IPv6 port number of the IMAP server

%IMAPPORT - Port number of the IMAP server

%MQTTPORT - Port number of the MQTT server

%TELNETPORT - Port number of the telnet server

%NOLISTENPORT - Port number where no service is listening

%POP36PORT - IPv6 port number of the POP3 server

%POP3PORT - Port number of the POP3 server

%POSIX_PWD - Current directory somewhat mingw friendly

%PROXYPORT - Port number of the HTTP proxy

%PWD - Current directory

%RTSP6PORT - IPv6 port number of the RTSP server

%RTSPPORT - Port number of the RTSP server

%SMBPORT - Port number of the SMB server

%SMBSPORT - Port number of the SMBS server

%SMTP6PORT - IPv6 port number of the SMTP server

%SMTPPORT - Port number of the SMTP server

%SOCKSPORT - Port number of the SOCKS4/5 server

%SRCDIR - Full path to the source dir

%SSHPORT - Port number of the SCP/SFTP server

%SSHSRVMD5 - MD5 of SSH server's public key

%SSHSRVSHA256 - SHA256 of SSH server's public key

%SSH_PWD - Current directory friendly for the SSH server

%TESTNUMBER - Number of the test case

%TFTP6PORT - IPv6 port number of the TFTP server

 %TFTPPORT - Port number of the TFTP server
%USER - Login ID of the user running the test

%VERSION - the full version number of the tested curl

Tags

Each test is always specified entirely within the <testcase> tag. Each test case is further split up into
four main sections: info , reply , client and verify .

info provides information about the test case

reply is used for the server to know what to send as a reply for the requests curl sends
client defines how the client should behave

verify defines how to verify that the data stored after a command has been run ended up correctly

Each main section supports a number of available sub-tags that can be specified, that will be checked/used
if specified.

<info>

<keywords>

A newline-separated list of keywords describing what this test case uses and tests. Try to use already used
keywords. These keywords will be used for statistical/informational purposes and for choosing or skipping
classes of tests. "Keywords" must begin with an alphabetic character, "-", "[" or "{" and may consist of
multiple words separated by spaces which are treated together as a single identifier.

When using curl built with Hyper, the keywords must include HTTP or HTTPS for 'hyper mode' to kick in and
make line ending checks work for tests.

<reply>

<data [nocheck="yes"] [sendzero="yes"] [base64="yes"] [hex="yes"]

[nonewline="yes"]>

data to be sent to the client on its request and later verified that it arrived safely. Set nocheck="yes" to
prevent the test script from verifying the arrival of this data.

If the data contains swsclose anywhere within the start and end tag, and this is an HTTP test, then the
connection will be closed by the server after this response is sent. If not, the connection will be kept
persistent.

If the data contains swsbounce anywhere within the start and end tag, the HTTP server will detect if this is
a second request using the same test and part number and will then increase the part number with one. This
is useful for auth tests and similar.
sendzero=yes means that the (FTP) server will "send" the data even if the size is zero bytes. Used to
verify curl's behavior on zero bytes transfers.

base64=yes means that the data provided in the test-file is a chunk of data encoded with base64. It is the
only way a test case can contain binary data. (This attribute can in fact be used on any section, but it does
not make much sense for other sections than "data").

hex=yes means that the data is a sequence of hex pairs. It will get decoded and used as "raw" data.

nonewline=yes means that the last byte (the trailing newline character) should be cut off from the data
before sending or comparing it.

For FTP file listings, the <data> section will be used only if you make sure that there has been a CWD
done first to a directory named test-[number] where [number] is the test case number. Otherwise
the ftp server can't know from which test file to load the list content.

<dataNUMBER>

Send back this contents instead of the one. The number NUMBER is set by:

The test number in the request line is >10000 and this is the remainder of [test case number]%10000.
The request was HTTP and included digest details, which adds 1000 to the number
If an HTTP request is NTLM type-1, it adds 1001 to the number

If an HTTP request is NTLM type-3, it adds 1002 to the number

If an HTTP request is Basic and the number is already >=1000, it adds 1

If an HTTP request is Negotiate, the number gets incremented by one for each request with Negotiate
authorization header on the same test case.

Dynamically changing the test number in this way allows the test harness to be used to test authentication
negotiation where several different requests must be sent to complete a transfer. The response to each
request is found in its own data section. Validating the entire negotiation sequence can be done by
specifying a datacheck section.

<connect>

The connect section is used instead of the 'data' for all CONNECT requests. The remainder of the rules for
the data section then apply but with a connect prefix.

<socks>

Address type and address details as logged by the SOCKS proxy.

<datacheck [mode="text"] [nonewline="yes"]>

if the data is sent but this is what should be checked afterwards. If nonewline=yes is set, runtests will cut
off the trailing newline from the data before comparing with the one actually received by the client.
Use the mode="text" attribute if the output is in text mode on platforms that have a text/binary difference.

<datacheckNUM [nonewline="yes"] [mode="text"]>

The contents of numbered datacheck sections are appended to the non-numbered one.

<size>

number to return on an ftp SIZE command (set to -1 to make this command fail)

<mdtm>

what to send back if the client sends an FTP MDTM command, set to -1 to have it return that the file does not
exist

<postcmd>

special purpose server-command to control its behavior after the reply is sent For HTTP/HTTPS, these are
supported:

wait [secs] - Pause for the given time

<servercmd>

Special-commands for the server.

The first line of this file will always be set to Testnum [number] by the test script, to allow servers to
read that to know what test the client is about to issue.

For FTP/SMTP/POP/IMAP

REPLY [command] [return value] [response string] - Changes how the server
responds to the [command]. [response string] is evaluated as a perl string, so it can contain embedded
\r\n, for example. There's a special [command] named "welcome" (without quotes) which is the string
sent immediately on connect as a welcome.

REPLYLF (like above but sends the response terminated with LF-only and not CRLF)

COUNT [command] [number] - Do the REPLY change for [command] only [number] times
and then go back to the built-in approach

DELAY [command] [secs] - Delay responding to this command for the given time

RETRWEIRDO - Enable the "weirdo" RETR case when multiple response lines appear at once when a
file is transferred

RETRNOSIZE - Make sure the RETR response does not contain the size of the file

NOSAVE - Do not save what is received

SLOWDOWN - Send FTP responses with 0.01 sec delay between each byte

PASVBADIP - makes PASV send back an illegal IP in its 227 response

CAPA [capabilities] - Enables support for and specifies a list of space separated capabilities to
 return to the client for the IMAP CAPABILITY , POP3 CAPA and SMTP EHLO commands
AUTH [mechanisms] - Enables support for SASL authentication and specifies a list of space
separated mechanisms for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP

STOR [msg] respond with this instead of default after STOR

For HTTP/HTTPS

auth_required if this is set and a POST/PUT is made without auth, the server will NOT wait for the
full request body to get sent

idle - do nothing after receiving the request, just "sit idle"

stream - continuously send data to the client, never-ending

writedelay: [msecs] delay this amount between reply packets

skip: [number] - instructs the server to ignore reading this many bytes from a PUT or POST
request

rtp: part [num] channel [num] size [num] - stream a fake RTP packet for the given part
on a chosen channel with the given payload size

connection-monitor - When used, this will log [DISCONNECT] to the server.input log
when the connection is disconnected.

upgrade - when an HTTP upgrade header is found, the server will upgrade to http2

swsclose - instruct server to close connection after response

no-expect - do not read the request body if Expect: is present

For TFTP

writedelay: [secs] delay this amount between reply packets (each packet being 512 bytes payload)

<client>

<server>

What server(s) this test case requires/uses. Available servers:

file

ftp-ipv6

ftp

ftps

gopher

gophers

http-ipv6

http-proxy

http-unix
 http/2
http

https

httptls+srp-ipv6

httptls+srp

imap

mqtt

none

pop3

rtsp-ipv6

rtsp

scp

sftp

smtp

socks4

socks5

Enter only one server per line. This subsection is mandatory.

<features>

A list of features that MUST be present in the client/library for this test to be able to run. If a required feature
is not present then the test will be SKIPPED.

Alternatively a feature can be prefixed with an exclamation mark to indicate a feature is NOT required. If the
feature is present then the test will be SKIPPED.

Features testable here are:

alt-svc

bearssl

c-ares

cookies

crypto

debug

DoH

getrlimit

GnuTLS

GSS-API
h2c
HSTS

HTTP-auth

http/2

hyper

idn

ipv6

Kerberos

large_file

ld_preload

libssh2

libssh

oldlibssh (versions before 0.9.4)

libz

manual

Mime

netrc

NSS

NTLM

OpenSSL

parsedate

proxy

PSL

rustls

Schannel

sectransp

shuffle-dns

socks

SPNEGO

SSL

SSLpinning

SSPI

threaded-resolver

TLS-SRP

TrackMemory
 typecheck
Unicode

unittest

unix-sockets

verbose-strings

wakeup

win32

wolfssh

wolfssl

in addition to all protocols that curl supports. A protocol only needs to be specified if it is different from the
server (useful when the server is none ).

<killserver>

Using the same syntax as in <server> but when mentioned here these servers are explicitly KILLED
when this test case is completed. Only use this if there is no other alternatives. Using this of course requires
subsequent tests to restart servers.

<precheck>

A command line that if set gets run by the test script before the test. If an output is displayed by the command
or if the return code is non-zero, the test will be skipped and the (single-line) output will be displayed as
reason for not running the test.

<postcheck>

A command line that if set gets run by the test script after the test. If the command exists with a non-zero
status code, the test will be considered to have failed.

<tool>

Name of tool to invoke instead of "curl". This tool must be built and exist either in the libtest/ directory
(if the tool name starts with lib ) or in the unit/ directory (if the tool name starts with unit ).

<name>

Brief test case description, shown when the test runs.

<setenv>

variable1=contents1
variable2=contents2
Set the given environment variables to the specified value before the actual command is run. They are
cleared again after the command has been run.

<command [option="no-output/no-include/force-output/binary-trace"]
[timeout="secs"][delay="secs"][type="perl/shell"]>

Command line to run.

Note that the URL that gets passed to the server actually controls what data that is returned. The last slash
in the URL must be followed by a number. That number (N) will be used by the test-server to load test case
N and return the data that is defined within the <reply><data></data></reply> section.

If there's no test number found above, the HTTP test server will use the number following the last dot in the
given hostname (made so that a CONNECT can still pass on test number) so that "foo.bar.123" gets treated
as test case 123. Alternatively, if an IPv6 address is provided to CONNECT, the last hexadecimal group in
the address will be used as the test number! For example the address "[1234::ff]" would be treated as test
case 255.

Set type="perl" to write the test case as a perl script. It implies that there's no memory debugging and
valgrind gets shut off for this test.

Set type="shell" to write the test case as a shell script. It implies that there's no memory debugging
and valgrind gets shut off for this test.

Set option="no-output" to prevent the test script to slap on the --output argument that directs the
output to a file. The --output is also not added if the verify/stdout section is used.

Set option="force-output" to make use of --output even when the test is otherwise written to
verify stdout.

Set option="no-include" to prevent the test script to slap on the --include argument.

Set option="binary-trace" to use --trace instead of --trace-ascii for tracing. Suitable for
binary-oriented protocols such as MQTT.

Set timeout="secs" to override default server logs advisor read lock timeout. This timeout is used by
the test harness, once that the command has completed execution, to wait for the test server to write out
server side log files and remove the lock that advised not to read them. The "secs" parameter is the not
negative integer number of seconds for the timeout. This timeout attribute is documented for
completeness sake, but is deep test harness stuff and only needed for specific test cases. Avoid using it.

Set delay="secs" to introduce a time delay once that the command has completed execution and
before the <postcheck> section runs. The "secs" parameter is the not negative integer number of
seconds for the delay. This 'delay' attribute is intended for specific test cases, and normally not needed.

<file name="log/filename" [nonewline="yes"]>

This creates the named file with this content before the test case is run, which is useful if the test case needs
a file to act on.

If nonewline="yes" is used, the created file will have the final newline stripped off.
<stdin [nonewline="yes"]>

Pass this given data on stdin to the tool.

If nonewline is set, we will cut off the trailing newline of this given data before comparing with the one
actually received by the client

<verify>

<errorcode>

numerical error code curl is supposed to return. Specify a list of accepted error codes by separating multiple
numbers with comma. See test 237 for an example.

<strip>

One regex per line that is removed from the protocol dumps before the comparison is made. This is useful to
remove dependencies on dynamically changing protocol data such as port numbers or user-agent strings.

<strippart>

One perl op per line that operates on the protocol dump. This is pretty advanced. Example: s/^EPRT
.*/EPRT stripped/ .

<protocol [nonewline="yes"]>

the protocol dump curl should transmit, if nonewline is set, we will cut off the trailing newline of this given
data before comparing with the one actually sent by the client The <strip> and <strippart> rules
are applied before comparisons are made.

<proxy [nonewline="yes"]>

The protocol dump curl should transmit to an HTTP proxy (when the http-proxy server is used), if
nonewline is set, we will cut off the trailing newline of this given data before comparing with the one
actually sent by the client The <strip> and <strippart> rules are applied before comparisons are
made.

<stderr [mode="text"] [nonewline="yes"]>

This verifies that this data was passed to stderr.

Use the mode="text" attribute if the output is in text mode on platforms that have a text/binary difference.

If nonewline is set, we will cut off the trailing newline of this given data before comparing with the one
actually received by the client

<stdout [mode="text"] [nonewline="yes"]>

This verifies that this data was passed to stdout.
Use the mode="text" attribute if the output is in text mode on platforms that have a text/binary difference.

If nonewline is set, we will cut off the trailing newline of this given data before comparing with the one
actually received by the client

<file name="log/filename" [mode="text"]>

The file's contents must be identical to this after the test is complete. Use the mode="text" attribute if the
output is in text mode on platforms that have a text/binary difference.

<file1>

1 to 4 can be appended to 'file' to compare more files.

<file2>

<file3>

<file4>

<stripfile>

One perl op per line that operates on the output file or stdout before being compared with what is stored in
the test file. This is pretty advanced. Example: "s/^EPRT .*/EPRT stripped/"

<stripfile1>

1 to 4 can be appended to stripfile to strip the corresponding content

<stripfile2>

<stripfile3>

<stripfile4>

<upload>

the contents of the upload data curl should have sent

<valgrind>

disable - disables the valgrind log check for this test

Build tests

Before you can run any tests you need to build curl but also build the test suite and its associated tools and
servers.

Most conveniently, you can just build and run them all by issuing make test in the build directory root but
if you want to work more on tests or perhaps even debug one, you may want to jump into the tests
directory and work from within that. Build it all and run test 144 like this:

cd tests
make
./runtests.pl 144

Run tests

The main script that runs tests is called tests/runtests.pl and some of its more useful features are:

Run a range of tests

Run test 1 to 27:

./runtests.pl 1 to 27

Run all tests marked as SFTP :

./runtests.pl SFTP

Run all tests not marked FTP :

./runtests.pl '!FTP'

Run a specific test with gdb

./runtests.pl -g 144

It starts up gdb, you can set break-points etc and then type run and off it goes and performs the entire thing
through the debugger.
Run a specific test without valgrind
The test suite will use valgrind by default if it finds it, which is an excellent way to find problems but it also
makes the test run much slower. Sometimes you want to do it faster:

./runtests.pl -n 144

Debug builds

When we speak of debug builds, we usually refer to curl builds that are done with debug code and symbols
still present. We strongly recommend you do this if you want to work with curl development as it makes it
easier to test and debug.

You make a debug build using configure like this:

./configure --enable-debug

Debug-builds make it possible to run individual test cases with gdb with runtests.pl, which is handy -
especially for example if you can make it crash somewhere as then gdb can catch it and show you exactly
where it happens etc.

Debug-builds are also built a little different than regular release builds in that they contain some snippets of
code that makes curl easier to test. For example it allows the test suite to override the random number
generator so that testing for values that otherwise are random actually work. Also, the unit tests only work on
debug builds.

Memdebug
Debug builds also enable the memdebug internal memory tracking and debugging system.

When switched on, the memdebug system outputs detailed information about a lot of memory-related
options into a logfile, so that it can be analyzed and verified after the fact. Verified that all memory was freed,
all files were closed and so on.

This is a poor-man's version of valgrind but does not at all compare with its features. It is however fairly
portable and low-impact.

In a debug build, the memdebug system is enabled by curl if the CURL_MEMDEBUG environment variable is
set to a file name, which is used for the log. The test suite sets this variable for us (see
tests/log/memdump ) and verifies it after each test run, if present.
Test servers
A large portion of the curl test suite actually runs curl command lines that interact with servers that are
started on the local machine for testing purposes only during the test, and that are shut down again at the
end of the test round.

The test servers are custom servers written for this purpose that speak HTTP, FTP, IMAP, POP3, SMTP,
TFTP, MQTT, SOCKS proxies and more.

All test servers are controlled via the test file: which servers that each test case needs to have running to
work, what they should return and how they are supposed to act for each test.

The test servers typically log their actions in dedicated files in tests/log , and they can be useful to
check out if your test does not act the way you want.

curl tests

The standard test in the suite is the "curl test". They all invoke a curl command line and verifies that
everything it sends, gets back and returns are exactly as expected. Any mismatch and the test is considered
a fail and the script shows details about the error.

What the test features in the <client><command> section is what is used in the command line, verbatim.

The tests/log/commands.log is handy to look at after a run, as it contains the full command line that
was run in the test.

If you want to make a test that does not invoke the curl command line tool, then you should consider the
libcurl tests or unit tests instead.

libcurl tests

A libcurl test is a stand-alone C program that uses the public libcurl API to do something.

Apart from that, everything else is tested, verified and checked the same way curl tests are.

Since these C programs are usually built and run on a plethora of different platforms, considerations might
need to be taken.

All libcurl test programs are kept in tests/libtest

Unit tests

Unit tests only work on debug builds.

Unit tests are tests that use functions that are libcurl internal and therefore not part of any public API,
headers or external documentation.
If the internal function you want to test is made static , they should instead be set UNITTEST - which
then makes debug builds not use static for them and they then become accessible to test from unit tests.

We provide a set of convenience functions and macros for unit tests to make it quick and easy to write them.

All unit test programs are kept in tests/unit

Valgrind

Valgrind is a popular and powerful tool for debugging programs and especially their use and abuse of
memory.

runtests.pl automatically detects if valgrind is installed on your system and will by default run tests
using valgrind if found. You can pass -n to runtests to disable the use of valgrind.

Valgrind makes execution much slower, but it is an excellent tool to find memory leaks and use of
uninitialized memory.

Continuous Integration

For every pull request submitted to the curl project on GitHub and for every commit pushed to the master
branch in the git repository, a vast amount of virtual machines fire up, check out that code from git, build it
with different options and run the test suite and make sure that everything is working fine.

We run CI jobs on several different operating systems, including Linux, macOS, Windows, Solaris and
FreeBSD.

We run jobs that build and test many different (combinations of) backends.

We have jobs that use different ways of building: autotools, cmake, winbuild, Visual Studio, etc.

We verify that the distribution tarball works.

We run source code analyzers.

Failing builds
Unfortunately, due to the complexity of everything involved we often have one or two CI jobs that seemingly
are stuck "permafailing", that seems to be failing the jobs on a permanent basis.

We work hard to make them not, but it is a tough job and we often see red builds even for changes that
should otherwise be "all green".
Autobuilds

Volunteering individuals run the autobuilds. This is a script that runs automatically that:

checks out the latest code from the git repository

builds everything

runs the test suite

sends the full log over email to the curl server

As they are then run on different platforms with different build options, they offer an extra dimension of
feedback on curl build health.

Check status
All logs are parsed, managed and displayed on the curl site.

Legacy
We started the autobuild system in 2003, a decade before CI jobs started becoming a serious alternative.

Now, the autobuilds are more of a legacy system as we are moving more and more into a world with CI and
more direct and earlier feedback.

Torture

When curl is built debug enabled, it offers a special kind of testing. The tests we call torture tests. Do not
worry, it is not quite as grim as it may sound.

They verify that libcurl and curl exit paths work without any crash or memory leak happening,

The torture tests work like this:

run the single test as-is first

count the number of invoked fallible functions
rerun the test once for every falling function call

make each fallible function call return error, one by one

verify that there is no leak or crash
continue until all fallible functions have been made to fail
This way of testing can take a seriously long time. I advise you to switch off valgrind when trying this out.

Rerun a specific failure

If a single test fails, runtests.pl will identify exactly which "round" that triggered the problem and by
using the -t as shown, you can run a command line that when invoked only fails that particular fallible
function.

Shallow
To make this way of testing a little more practical, the test suite also provides a --shallow option. This
lets the user set a maximum number of fallible functions to fail per test case. If there are more invokes to fail
than is set with this value, the script will randomly select which ones to fail.

As a special feature, as randomizing things in tests can be uncomfortable, the script will use a random seed
based on year + month, so it will remain the same for each calendar month. Convenient, as if you rerun the
same test with the same --shallow value it will run the same random tests.

You can force a different seed with runtests' --seed option.

Index

.netrc: Command line leakage, .netrc, All easy options, <features>

/etc/hosts: Run a local clone, Host, Edit the hosts file

<

<curl/curl.h>: include/curl, Header files, Include files, curl --libcurl, Get a simple HTML page, Get a
response into memory, Submit a login form over HTTP, Get an FTP directory listing, Non-blocking
HTTP form-post
A

--alt-svc: Enable

--anyauth: HTTP authentication

apt: Ubuntu and Debian

Arch Linux: Arch Linux

-b: Cookie engine, curl HTTP cheat sheet, Web logins and sessions
--basic: HTTP authentication

BearSSL: lib/vtls, Build to use a TLS library, <features>

BoringSSL: Build to use a TLS library, Build curl with boringssl, Restrictions

brotli: HTTP Compression, Version, Which libcurl version runs, About content encodings, Conditional
lines

-c: Writing cookies to file, curl HTTP cheat sheet, Web logins and sessions
c-ares: c-ares, Line 4: Features, Name resolve tricks with c-ares, Name resolver backends,
CURLRES_ARES , <features>

C89: Comments, Build

CA: Verbose mode, MITM proxy, Available exit codes, Verifying server certificates, OCSP stapling,
Verification, All easy options

Chrome: SSLKEYLOGFILE, Copy as curl

clone: Building libcurl on MSYS2, Clone the code, git, Web site source code, build boringssl
code of conduct: Trust, Code of conduct
--compressed: Compression, Gzipped transfers, curl HTTP cheat sheet
configure: root, Handling different build options, Platform dependent code, On Linux and Unix-like
systems, Autotools, configure, set up the build tree to get detected by curl's configure, Ifdefs, Memory
Debugging, Debug builds
--connect-timeout: Connection timeout, Never spend more than this to connect
--connect-to: Provide a replacement name
connection cache: Persistent connections, Connection reuse, Multi handle, All easy options, Connection
cache, connectdata
connection pool: Connection reuse, Persistent connections, Connection reuse, Connection cache
Connection reuse: URLs, Connection reuse, Connection reuse, Connection cache
content-encoding: Compression, Transfer encoding, About content encodings

contribute: Code of conduct, Contributing, Introduction

Contributing: docs, Contributing

Cookie engine: Cookie engine, Cookie engine

Cookies: docs, libpsl, Line 4: Features, Server differences, Change the Host: header, Not perfect, HTTP
authentication, Cookies, Cookie file format, Cookies, Simple by default, more on demand, Available
information, Sharing between easy handles, All easy options, Submit a login form over HTTP, Sections,
HTTP authentication, Cookies with libcurl, Curl_share, <features>
copyright: License, Copyright

curl-announce: curl-announce, Vulnerability handling

curl-library: curl-users, Make a patch for the mailing list, Vulnerability handling
curl-users: curl-users, Vulnerability handling
CURLE_ABORTED_BY_CALLBACK: Progress callback
CURLHSTS_ENABLE: Enable HSTS for a handle

CURLHSTS_READONLYFILE: Enable HSTS for a handle

CURLINFO_CERTINFO: Available information
CURLINFO_CONTENT_TYPE: Post transfer info
CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL: Available information
CURLINFO_FILETIME: Available information

CURLINFO_TOTAL_TIME_T: Available information

CURLMOPT_PIPELINING: Multiplexing
CURLMOPT_SOCKETFUNCTION: socket_callback
CURLMOPT_TIMERFUNCTION: timer_callback

CURLOPT_ALTSVC: All easy options, Enable

CURLOPT_ALTSVC_CTRL: All easy options, Enable
CURLOPT_CLOSESOCKETFUNCTION: Socket close callback, All easy options
CURLOPT_COOKIE: All easy options, Setting custom cookies
CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE: All easy options, Submit a login form over HTTP, Enable cookie engine with
reading
CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR: All easy options, Enable cookie engine with writing
CURLOPT_COOKIELIST: All easy options, Add a cookie to the cookie store
CURLOPT_CURLU: URL API, CURLOPT_CURLU, All easy options
CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST: All easy options, Request method

CURLOPT_DEBUGDATA: Debug callback, All easy options, Trace everything

CURLOPT_DEBUGFUNCTION: Debug callback, All easy options, Trace everything
CURLOPT_DNS_CACHE_TIMEOUT: Caching, All easy options, DNS cache
CURLOPT_DNS_INTERFACE: Name server options, All easy options
CURLOPT_DNS_LOCAL_IP4: Name server options, All easy options
CURLOPT_DNS_LOCAL_IP6: Name server options, All easy options
CURLOPT_DNS_SERVERS: Name server options, All easy options
CURLOPT_DNS_USE_GLOBAL_CACHE: No global DNS cache, All easy options
CURLOPT_ERRORBUFFER: curl --libcurl, All easy options, CURLcode return code

CURLOPT_FAILONERROR: All easy options, About HTTP response code "errors"

CURLOPT_HEADER: Write callback, All easy options, Referrer, Download headers too
CURLOPT_HEADERDATA: Header callback, curl --libcurl, All easy options, Download headers too
CURLOPT_HEADERFUNCTION: Header callback, curl --libcurl, All easy options
CURLOPT_HSTS: All easy options, Set a HSTS cache file
CURLOPT_HSTS_CTRL: All easy options, Enable HSTS for a handle
CURLOPT_HTTPGET: All easy options, Submit a login form over HTTP, libcurl HTTP download
CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER: All easy options, Non-blocking HTTP form-post, Add a header, HTTP PUT
CURLOPT_HTTPPOST: All easy options

CURLOPT_IPRESOLVE: Name resolving, All easy options

CURLOPT_MAXFILESIZE_LARGE: Set numerical options, All easy options
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS: curl --libcurl, All easy options
CURLOPT_MIMEPOST: All easy options, Non-blocking HTTP form-post, HTTP multipart formposts
CURLOPT_NOBODY: All easy options, Request method
CURLOPT_NOPROGRESS: Progress callback, curl --libcurl, All easy options
CURLOPT_OPENSOCKETDATA: Provide a file descriptor, All easy options
CURLOPT_OPENSOCKETFUNCTION: Provide a file descriptor, All easy options
CURLOPT_PIPEWAIT: All easy options, Multiplexing

CURLOPT_POST: All easy options, HTTP POST

CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS: Set string options, All easy options, Submit a login form over HTTP,
Request method, HTTP POST

CURLOPT_POSTFIELDSIZE: CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS , All easy options, HTTP POST

CURLOPT_POSTREDIR: Decide what method to use in redirects, All easy options
CURLOPT_PROGRESSFUNCTION: Progress callback, All easy options
CURLOPT_PROXY: Proxy types, All easy options
CURLOPT_PROXYPORT: Proxy types, All easy options
CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE: Proxy types, All easy options

CURLOPT_READDATA: Read callback, curl --libcurl, All easy options

CURLOPT_READFUNCTION: Read callback, curl --libcurl, All easy options, HTTP POST
CURLOPT_RESOLVE: Custom addresses for hosts, All easy options
CURLOPT_SEEKDATA: seek callback, curl --libcurl, All easy options
CURLOPT_SEEKFUNCTION: seek callback, curl --libcurl, All easy options
CURLOPT_SOCKOPTDATA: sockopt callback, All easy options
CURLOPT_SOCKOPTFUNCTION: sockopt callback, All easy options
CURLOPT_SSH_KNOWNHOSTS: SSH key callback, curl --libcurl, All easy options
CURLOPT_SSLVERSION: Protocol version, All easy options

CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST: Verification, All easy options

CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER: HTTPS proxy, Verification, All easy options
CURLOPT_STDERR: curl --libcurl, All easy options, Verbose operations
CURLOPT_TCP_KEEPALIVE: curl --libcurl, All easy options

CURLOPT_TIMEOUT: Set numerical options, All easy options

CURLOPT_TLSAUTH_USERNAME: TLS auth, All easy options

CURLOPT_UPLOAD: All easy options, Request method, HTTP PUT

CURLOPT_URL: Easy handle, CURLOPT_CURLU, curl --libcurl, Set handle options, Set string
options, All easy options, Get a simple HTML page, Get a response into memory, Submit a login form
over HTTP, Get an FTP directory listing, Non-blocking HTTP form-post, Strings are C strings, not C++
string objects, Request method, Bearer, libcurl HTTP download, HTTP PUT
CURLOPT_USERAGENT: curl --libcurl, All easy options, Get a response into memory

CURLOPT_VERBOSE: All easy options, Find a specific option by name, Verbose operations, Non-
blocking HTTP form-post, Download headers too

CURLOPT_WRITEDATA: Write callback, curl --libcurl, All easy options, Get a response into memory,
Callback considerations

CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION: Write callback, curl --libcurl, All easy options, Get a response into
memory, Callback considerations

CURLOPT_XFERINFODATA: Progress callback, All easy options

CURLOPT_XFERINFOFUNCTION: Progress callback, All easy options

CURLUPART_FRAGMENT: Get individual URL parts, Set individual URL parts

CURLUPART_HOST: Get individual URL parts, Set individual URL parts

CURLUPART_PASSWORD: Get individual URL parts, Set individual URL parts

CURLUPART_PATH: Get individual URL parts, Set individual URL parts

CURLUPART_PORT: Get individual URL parts, Set individual URL parts

CURLUPART_QUERY: Get individual URL parts, Set individual URL parts, Append to the query
CURLUPART_USER: Get individual URL parts, Set individual URL parts

curl_easy_cleanup: easy handle, curl --libcurl, Get a simple HTML page, Get a response into memory,
Submit a login form over HTTP, Get an FTP directory listing, Non-blocking HTTP form-post, Bearer,
Header struct, Enable cookie engine with writing
curl_easy_getinfo: docs/libcurl/opts, Post transfer info, Response meta-data, Get all cookies from the
cookie store
curl_easy_init: Easy handle, CURLOPT_CURLU, curl --libcurl, Get a simple HTML page, Get a
response into memory, Submit a login form over HTTP, Get an FTP directory listing, Non-blocking
HTTP form-post, Bearer, libcurl HTTP download
curl_easy_option_by_id: Find a specific option by ID
curl_easy_option_by_next: Iterate over all options

curl_easy_perform: Driving with the easy interface, Easy API pool, Caching, curl --libcurl, Get a simple
HTML page, Get a response into memory, Submit a login form over HTTP, Get an FTP directory listing,
Add a header, Bearer, libcurl HTTP download, Everything is multi
curl_easy_reset: Reuse

curl_easy_setopt: docs/libcurl/opts, Easy handle, Write callback, Read callback, Progress callback,
Header callback, Debug callback, sockopt callback, Provide a file descriptor, Name resolving, Sharing
between easy handles, CURLOPT_CURLU, curl --libcurl, Set handle options, Set numerical options,
Set string options, libcurl TLS options, All easy options, CURLcode return code, Verbose operations,
Get a simple HTML page, Get a response into memory, Submit a login form over HTTP, Get an FTP
directory listing, Non-blocking HTTP form-post, Strings are C strings, not C++ string objects, Request
method, HTTP ranges, User name and password, Enable cookie engine with reading, libcurl HTTP
download, HTTP POST, Multiplexing, Enable HSTS for a handle, Enable

curl_global_cleanup: Global initialization, Get a response into memory, Get an FTP directory listing
curl_global_init: Global initialization, Get a response into memory, Get an FTP directory listing, Init calls

CURL_IPRESOLVE_V6: Name resolving

CURL_MAX_WRITE_SIZE: Write callback

curl_mime_addpart: Non-blocking HTTP form-post, HTTP multipart formposts

curl_mime_filedata: Non-blocking HTTP form-post, HTTP multipart formposts

curl_mime_init: Non-blocking HTTP form-post, HTTP multipart formposts

curl_mime_name: Non-blocking HTTP form-post, HTTP multipart formposts

curl_multi_add_handle: Driving with the multi interface, Many easy handles, Non-blocking HTTP form-
post, Curl_multi

curl_multi_cleanup: Multi API, Non-blocking HTTP form-post

curl_multi_fdset: Driving with the multi interface, Curl_easy

curl_multi_info_read: When is a single transfer done?, When is it done?, Multi API, Curl_multi

curl_multi_init: Driving with the multi interface, Non-blocking HTTP form-post

curl_multi_remove_handle: Driving with the multi interface, Many easy handles, Multi API

curl_multi_setopt: docs/libcurl/opts, Driving with the multi interface, socket_callback, Multiplexing

curl_multi_socket_action: socket_callback

curl_multi_timeout: Driving with the multi interface

curl_multi_wait: Driving with the multi interface

curl_off_t: Progress callback, seek callback, Available information, Set numerical options, Response
meta-data, HTTP PUT

CURL_SOCKET_TIMEOUT: timer_callback
 CURL_SSL_BACKEND: Line 1: TLS versions, Multiple TLS backends
curl_url: Include files, Create, cleanup, duplicate, Parse a URL, Redirect to a relative URL,
CURLOPT_CURLU

curl_url_cleanup: Create, cleanup, duplicate

curl_url_dup: Create, cleanup, duplicate

curl_url_get: CURLU_ALLOW_SPACE , Get a URL, Get individual URL parts

curl_url_set: Include files, Parse a URL, Redirect to a relative URL, Set individual URL parts, Append to
the query, CURLOPT_CURLU

curl_version_info: Support, Which libcurl version runs

-d: Arguments to options, Separate options per URL, POST, MQTT, HTTP methods, Simple POST,
Content-Type, Posting binary, Convert to GET, Expect 100-continue, Chunked encoded POSTs, Hidden
form fields, -d vs -F, HTTP PUT, curl HTTP cheat sheet, Web logins and sessions

--data: Arguments to options, Separate options per URL, POST, Simple POST, JSON, URL encoding

--data-binary: Not perfect, Posting binary, URL encoding

--data-urlencode: URL encoding, Convert to GET

debian: Ubuntu and Debian, Version

Debug callback: Debug callback, All easy options, Verbose operations

development: Project communication, curl-users, Reporting bugs, Commercial support, Development,
The development team, Future, Ubuntu and Debian, Who decides what goes in?, From Safari, Figure
out what a browser sends, Which libcurl version runs, Verification, Tests, Debug builds

DICT: What protocols does curl support?, DICT, Without scheme, Version, DICT,
CURLU_GUESS_SCHEME

Edge: Copy as curl, Ifdefs

environment variables: Proxies, Proxy environment variables, Proxy environment variables,
<setenv>

ETag: Conditionals
--etag-compare: Check by modification of content
--etag-save: Check by modification of content
etiquette: Mailing list etiquette
 event-driven: Driving with the "multi_socket" interface, Everything is multi

-F: multipart formpost, Not perfect, HTTP methods, HTTP POST, Sending such a form with curl, -d vs -F,
curl HTTP cheat sheet

--fail: Available exit codes, HTTP response codes

--fail-with-body: HTTP response codes

Firefox: lib/vtls, Discover your proxy, SSLKEYLOGFILE, Copy as curl, User-agent

Fragment: URLs, Fragment, Modify the HTTP request, Anchors or fragments, CURLWS_FINAL ,
CURLWS_CONT
--ftp-method: multicwd
--ftp-pasv: Passive connections

--ftp-port: Available exit codes, Active connections

--ftp-skip-pasv-ip: Passive connections

FTPS: What protocols does curl support?, FTPS, Build to use a TLS library, Supported schemes,
Network leakage, --trace and --trace-ascii, Version, Protocols allowing upload, Enable TLS, FTPS,
Variables

future: Project communication, Future, What other protocols are there?, docs, [email protected],
"Not used", Cookies, Multiplexing, When QUIC is denied, Network data conversion, API compatibility,
HSTS

--get: Convert to GET

git: Daily snapshots, Building libcurl on MSYS2, Clone the code, root, git, Web site source code, git vs
release tarballs, Notes, build boringssl, Continuous Integration (CI), Autobuilds
Globbing: URL globbing, Uploading with FTP
GnuTLS: lib/vtls, Select TLS backend, Build to use a TLS library, OCSP stapling, Restrictions, Proxy
types, <features>

GOPHER: How it started, What protocols does curl support?, GOPHER, Supported schemes, Version,
Variables

GOPHERS: What protocols does curl support?, GOPHERS, Supported schemes, Variables
H
--header: Server differences, Proxy headers, JSON, Customize headers

Header callback: Header callback, All easy options, Response body, Download headers too

homebrew: Get curl for macOS

Host:: Verbose mode, --trace and --trace-ascii, Change the Host: header, HTTP protocol basics, The
HTTP this generates, Customize headers, Customize HTTP request headers

--hsts: HSTS cache

HSTS: HTTP Strict Transport Security, Callbacks, HSTS, All easy options, Sections, HSTS,
<features>

HTTP ranges: HTTP ranges, Sections, HTTP ranges

HTTP redirects: Short options, Available exit codes, HTTP redirects, Submit a login form over HTTP

HTTP Strict Transport Security: HTTP Strict Transport Security, HSTS

HTTP/1.1: HTTP, Verbose mode, --trace and --trace-ascii, Debugging with TELNET, HTTP protocol
basics, HTTP versions, Caveats, The HTTP this generates, GET or POST?, Modify the request method,
Modify request target, HTTP/2, Customize HTTP request headers, HTTP versions, About content
encodings

HTTP/2: HTTP, docs, nghttp2, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, Line 4: Features, Available exit codes, HTTP
versions, HTTP/2 and later, GET or POST?, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, DNS over HTTPS, HTTP versions,
Header origins, Expect: headers, Multiplexing, HTTP/3, Different backends, Curl_easy, Variables

HTTP/3: HTTPS, Select HTTP/3 backend, TCP vs UDP, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, Line 4: Features,
Available exit codes, HTTP versions, HTTP/3, HTTP/3, Which libcurl version runs, HTTP versions,
Header origins, Expect: headers, Multiplexing, HTTP/3, Different backends

HTTP/3 backend: Select HTTP/3 backend

--http0.9: Accepting HTTP/0.9

--http1.1: HTTP versions

--http2: HTTP versions, HTTP/2
--http2-prior-knowledge: HTTP versions, HTTP/2
--http3: HTTP versions, Enable
HttpGet: How it started

IDN: libidn2, International Domain Names (IDN), Version, CURLU_URLENCODE , Different backends,
<features>
Indentation: Indentation

IPv4: Host, Port number, Available --write-out variables, Name resolving, All easy options, host*.c
sources, Variables
IPv6: Host, Port number, URL globbing, Available --write-out variables, Version, Name resolving, Zone
 ID, All easy options, CURLRES_IPV6 , Variables
IRC: How it started, Project communication

JavaScript: Client differences, PAC, HTTP POST, JavaScript and forms, JavaScript redirects, Figure out
what the browser does

--json: JSON

json: Arguments with spaces, Available --write-out variables, HTTP POST, Content-Type, JSON, POST
outside of HTML

-K: Command lines, quotes and aliases, Config file

keep-alive: All easy options
--keepalive-time: Keep alive

KNOWN_BUGS: Future

-L: Short options, Available --write-out variables, Tell curl to follow redirects, Modify the request method,
Cookie engine, curl HTTP cheat sheet, Redirects
--libcurl: curl --libcurl
libcurl version: The latest version?, Line 1: curl, Available exit codes, Network data conversion, Which
libcurl version
libidn2: libidn2

libpsl: libpsl
libressl: Build to use a TLS library, Restrictions
librtmp: librtmp

libssh: SSH libraries, SCP and SFTP, <features>

libssh2: Running DLL based configurations, SSH libraries, SCP and SFTP, <features>
license: Finding users, License, root, License
--limit-rate: Rate limiting
--location: Long options, Separate options per URL, Config file, Tell curl to follow redirects
M

--max-filesize: Maximum filesize

--max-time: Tweak your retries, Maximum time allowed to spend

MIT: License

MQTT: What protocols does curl support?, MQTT, Supported schemes, Line 3: Protocols, MQTT,
Variables, Test servers

mTLS: Client certificates

multi-threading: libcurl multi-threading

name resolving: Host name resolving, Handling different build options, Available --write-out variables,
Name resolve tricks with c-ares, SOCKS proxy, Connection reuse, Name resolving, Proxy types,
Available information, Different backends

--negotiate: Network leakage, HTTP authentication

--netrc-file: Enable netrc

--netrc-optional: Enable netrc

nghttp2: nghttp2, Which libcurl version runs
nix: nix
--no-clobber: Overwriting

--no-eprt: Active connections

--no-epsv: Passive connections
NPN: All easy options

NSS: Build to use a TLS library, OCSP stapling, Restrictions, Proxy types, <features>
--ntlm: Network leakage, HTTP authentication

-O: Many options and URLs, Numerical ranges, Download to a file named by the URL, Use the target
file name from the server, Shell redirects, Multiple downloads, Resuming and ranges, Examples,
Authentication, Download, Check by modification date, curl HTTP cheat sheet
openldap: openldap
 OpenSSL: Get curl and libcurl on MSYS2, lib/vtls, Select TLS backend, Running DLL based
configurations, Build to use a TLS library, Available exit codes, OCSP stapling, Restrictions, SSL
context callback, Proxy types, Available information, All easy options, <features>

PAC: Proxies, PAC, Which proxy?

--parallel: Parallel transfers, Request rate limiting

--parallel-immediate: Connection before multiplex

--parallel-max: Parallel transfers

--path-as-is: --path-as-is

Percent-encoding: URL encoding

pop3: What protocols does curl support?, POP3, Without scheme, Verbose mode, Version, Available
exit codes, Reading email, Secure mail transfer, Enable TLS, CURLU_GUESS_SCHEME , STARTTLS,
Variables, Test servers

port number: Connects to port numbers, URLs, Port number, Available --write-out variables,
Connections, Provide a custom IP address for a name, Local port number, HTTP proxy, Available exit
codes, Historic TELNET, The URL converted to a request, Converting a web form, Enable, Implicit
FTPS, Connection reuse, Prereq, Custom addresses for hosts, Proxies, Post transfer info,
CURLU_DEFAULT_PORT , Set individual URL parts, All easy options, Base64 Encoding

--post301: Decide what method to use in redirects

--post302: Decide what method to use in redirects

--post303: Decide what method to use in redirects

Progress callback: timer_callback, Progress callback, All easy options

pronunciation: Pronunciation
proxy: How it started, Available --write-out variables, Line 4: Features, Intermediaries' fiddlings, Proxies,
Discover your proxy, PAC, Proxy type, HTTP proxy, SOCKS proxy, MITM proxy, Proxy authentication,
HTTPS proxy, Proxy environment variables, Proxy headers, Available exit codes, CONNECT response
codes, HTTP authentication, Proxies, Available information, Verification, All easy options, HTTP proxy,
Header origins, Variables
--proxy: HTTP proxy, HTTP authentication
--proxy-user: Proxy authentication, HTTP authentication
--proxy1.0: HTTP proxy tunneling
--proxytunnel: HTTP proxy tunneling

Q
 -Q: Quote
--quote: Quote

ranges: Numerical ranges, Downloads, Resuming and ranges, HTTP ranges, Provide a file descriptor,
Sections, HTTP response code, HTTP ranges

--rate: Request rate limiting

Read callback: Read callback, All easy options

redhat: Redhat and CentOS

redirects: Long options, Separate options per URL, Config file, Available --write-out variables,
Downloads, Download to a file named by the URL, Shell redirects, Provide a custom IP address for a
name, Available exit codes, HTTP redirects, Modify the request method, Redirects, Custom addresses
for hosts, Available information, All easy options, Submit a login form over HTTP, Automatic referrer,
Request number
RELEASE-NOTES: scripts

releases: [1. The cURL project](how-to-read.md#1.-the-curl-project), curl-announce, Releases, scripts,

Releases source code, Verbose mode, Which libcurl version

--remote-name-all: One output for each given URL, Use the URL's file name part for all URLs
--remove-on-error: Leftovers on errors
repository: Releases, Source code on GitHub, Arch Linux, Building libcurl on MSYS2, Hosting and
download, root, What to add, Web site source code, git vs release tarballs, Notes, Continuous
Integration (CI), Autobuilds, Content

--resolve: Provide a custom IP address for a name

--retry: Retrying failed attempts, Request rate limiting
--retry-all-errors: Retry on any and all errors

--retry-connrefused: Connection refused

--retry-delay: Tweak your retries

--retry-max-time: Tweak your retries

RFC 1436: GOPHER
RFC 1738: FILE, multicwd
RFC 1939: POP3
RFC 1945: HTTP redirects
RFC 2229: DICT

RFC 2246: TLS versions

RFC 2326: RTSP
RFC 2595: IMAP
 RFC 2818: HTTPS
RFC 3207: SMTP
RFC 3501: IMAP
RFC 3986: URLs
RFC 4217: FTPS
RFC 4511: LDAP

RFC 5321: SMTP

RFC 7230: HTTP
RFC 7540: HTTP
RFC 7838: Alternative Services

RFC 8314: IMAPS

RFC 8446: TLS versions
RFC 854: TELNET
RFC 959: FTP, FTP with curl, Quote
roadmap: Future

RTMP: What protocols does curl support?, RTMP, librtmp, Supported schemes, Version
RTSP: What protocols does curl support?, RTSP, Supported schemes, Version, Callbacks, RTSP
interleave callback, Available information, All easy options, Variables

rustls: Build to use a TLS library, <features>

rustls-ffi: Select TLS backend, Rustls

Safari: Copy as curl

Schannel: Build to use a TLS library, CA store on windows, <features>

Scheme: Connects to port numbers, FILE, Naming, librtmp, URLs, Scheme, Name and password, TCP
vs UDP, Available --write-out variables, Proxy type, SOCKS proxy, Proxy authentication, Available exit
codes, TLS for emails, Proxy types, Available information, CURLU_NON_SUPPORT_SCHEME ,
CURLU_DEFAULT_PORT , WebSocket URLs, Which libcurl version, Get a response into memory,
HTTPS, HTTP authentication, Bindings for libcurl, Protocol handler, Curl_handler

SCP: What protocols does curl support?, SCP, SSH libraries, Supported schemes, Version, Protocols
allowing upload, Available exit codes, SCP and SFTP, All easy options, Curl_handler, <server>
security: curl-announce, Commercial support, Security, Trust, Security, How much do protocols
change?, FTPS, docs, Reporting vulnerabilities, http_proxy in lower case only, TLS, TLS ciphers,
Enable TLS, TLS versions, HTTP with curl, Accepting HTTP/0.9, HTTP Strict Transport Security, HSTS,
URL API, WebSocket URLs, Protocol version, All easy options, HTTPS
SFTP: What protocols does curl support?, SFTP, SSH libraries, Supported schemes, --trace and --trace-
ascii, Version, Protocols allowing upload, Available exit codes, SCP and SFTP, All easy options,
 Curl_handler, <server> , Run a range of tests
--show-error: Silence

--silent: The progress meter, Silence, Error message

SMTP: What protocols does curl support?, SMTP, Without scheme, Verbose mode, Version, Protocols
allowing upload, Available exit codes, Sending email, Enable TLS, CURLU_GUESS_SCHEME ,
STARTTLS, All easy options, Variables, Test servers
SMTPS: What protocols does curl support?, SMTPS, Build to use a TLS library, Supported schemes,
Version, Protocols allowing upload, Enable TLS
snapshots: Daily snapshots, root

SNI: Change the Host: header

--socks4: SOCKS proxy

--socks4a: SOCKS proxy

--socks5: SOCKS proxy

--socks5-hostname: SOCKS proxy

--speed-limit: Stop slow transfers
--speed-time: Stop slow transfers
SSH: SCP, Select SSH backend, SSH libraries, Available exit codes, SCP and SFTP, Historic
TELNET, Callbacks, SSH key callback, All easy options, Trace everything, Different backends,
Curl_handler, Variables
SSH backend: Select SSH backend
SSL context callback: SSL context callback, All easy options
SSLKEYLOGFILE: TLS, SSLKEYLOGFILE

STARTTLS: IMAP, TLS for emails, Explicit FTPS, STARTTLS

-T: PUT, Upload, HTTP methods, HTTP PUT, curl HTTP cheat sheet, Uploading with FTP
TELNET: What protocols does curl support?, TELNET, Supported schemes, Version, Available exit
codes, TELNET, All easy options, Variables
testing: What does curl do?, Reporting bugs, Handling different build options, Contributing, Run a local
clone, About HTTP response code "errors", Debug builds, Test servers, Torture tests

TFTP: What protocols does curl support?, TFTP, Supported schemes, TCP vs UDP, Version, Protocols
allowing upload, Available exit codes, TFTP, All easy options, Variables, Test servers

--tftp-blksize: TFTP options

--tftp-no-options: TFTP options
--time-cond: Check by modification date
TLS: Security, How much do protocols change?, GOPHERS, Ubuntu and Debian, lib/vtls, Handling
 different build options, Learn more, Select TLS backend, TLS libraries, Build to use a TLS library,
Connection reuse, Verbose mode, Line 1: curl, Change the Host: header, MITM proxy, Available exit
codes, SCP and SFTP, TLS for emails, Caveats, TLS, TLS ciphers, Enable TLS, TLS versions,
Verifying server certificates, Certificate pinning, OCSP stapling, Client certificates, TLS auth, TLS
backends, SSLKEYLOGFILE, HTTP with curl, The URL converted to a request, HTTPS, Figure out
what a browser sends, HTTPS only, TLS fingerprinting, FTPS, SSL context callback, Proxy types,
Available information, WebSocket URLs, libcurl TLS options, All easy options, Trace everything,
Caches, HTTPS, Different backends, Variables
TLS backend: Ubuntu and Debian, lib/vtls, Select TLS backend, Line 1: curl, Available exit codes, TLS,
Certificate pinning, Client certificates, TLS backends, SSL context callback
TODO: Future, Suggestions, Notes

--tr-encoding: Compression, Transfer encoding

--trace: --trace and --trace-ascii, <command [option="no-output/no-include/force-

output/binary-trace"] [timeout="secs"][delay="secs"][type="perl/shell"]>

--trace-ascii: --trace and --trace-ascii, Server differences, curl HTTP cheat sheet, <command
[option="no-output/no-include/force-output/binary-trace"]
[timeout="secs"][delay="secs"][type="perl/shell"]>
--trace-time: --trace-time

transfer-encoding: Pass on transfer encoding, Chunked encoded POSTs

-U: Building libcurl on MSYS2, Proxy authentication

-u: Building libcurl on MSYS2, Passwords and snooping, URLs, IMAP, HTTP authentication, curl HTTP
cheat sheet, Authentication
Ubuntu: Ubuntu and Debian

URL Globbing: URL globbing

--verbose: Long options, Verbose mode, --trace-time

--version: Version, TLS backends, Memory Debugging
Vulnerability: Vulnerability handling

W
 Wireshark: --trace and --trace-ascii, Available exit codes, SSLKEYLOGFILE, Figure out what a browser
sends
wolfSSH: SSH libraries, SCP and SFTP, <features>

wolfSSL: Commercial support, lib/vtls, Running DLL based configurations, Build to use a TLS library,
Restrictions, SSL context callback, All easy options, <features>

Write callback: Write callback, 1. The callback approach, Raw mode, Write callback, All easy options,
Get a response into memory, Callback considerations

--write-out: --write-out, Overwriting, HTTP response codes

-x: HTTP proxy, SOCKS proxy, Proxy authentication, Proxy environment variables, Proxy headers, curl
HTTP cheat sheet, Proxy environment variables
-X: Modify the request method, Modify request target, HTTP PUT, curl HTTP cheat sheet

yum: Redhat and CentOS

-z: Check by modification date

-Z: Parallel transfers
zlib: HTTP Compression, About content encodings
zstd: HTTP Compression, Which libcurl version runs, Supported content encodings