Getting Started with cURL
Hey Everyone,
In this blog, we will be learning about cURL. A simple tool, yet powerful, used to communicate with the server from your terminal.
Before starting with cURL, let’s first understand what a server is.
It is like a computer:
That listens to your request
Do some logic
Send back a response
When you open a website in a browser
Your browser send request to the server.
Server will return with HTML, CSS and JS files.
What is cURL?
It is a command-line tool that lets you send requests to a server and view the responses in the terminal.
It is a way to communicate with the server without the browser.
Instead of typing the URL in Chrome, just run a command in the terminal. That’s it.
Why programmers need cURL
The browser hides many details
Programmers often need to:
Test API
Get the status of the server
debug backend
cURL helps because:
It is fast
it shows what the response of the server is
It is available on Mac, Windows, linux.
Making your first request using cURL
Let’s start with the basic command
curl www.example.com
After entering this command in the terminal
cURL sends a request to www.example.com.
The server responds with the data, and cURL prints it in the terminal.
Understanding request and response
The communication between the server and client has two parts
Request
A request contains:
Where you want to go (URL)
What do you want to perform (GET, POST, etc)
Response
A response contains:
Status Code
Data
Some of the status codes. No need to learn, you will learn it on the go while working with them
Status Code
Status
200→ SuccessStatus
404→ Not foundStatus
500→ Server error
For now, remember this:
Request asks. Response answers.
Using cURL to talk to APIs
APIs are the servers that usually return JSON instead of HTML.
Example:
curl https://api.github.com
The response:
is not a webpage
is structured data (JSON)
GET and POST
For now, this will be the most common
GET Request - Fetch Data
curl https://api.example.com/users
POST Request — Send data to server
curl -X POST https://api.example.com/users
Don’t worry about flags yet. You might be thinking what is -X? It is a flag that is used to specify the type of request. So why didn’t you write in the GET request, because GET is the default request in cURL.
cURL is not about memorizing commands.
It’s about understanding how clients talk to servers.
And now, you know what cURL command is.
If you have any doubt or want to connect, feel free to drop a comment — I’d be happy to help.
Thanks for reading, and see you in the next blog!
Peace ✌️ and Happy Learning!
