cURL is a very convenient command line tool to send and retrieve data using the URL syntax. It supports a large number of protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, LDAP, LDAPS, DICT, TELNET, FILE . IMAP, POP3, SMTP and RTSP.
I have been using cURL for quickly and conveniently testing RESTFul APIs.
Since I am doing most of my development on Windows platforms, I am using cURL in conjunction with Console, a Windows console window enhancement tool.
First you need to download and install cURL for your platform (windows, Linux ect). Then you can do a quick test by accessible the home page of your favorite web site:
This should display the HTML content of the home page. At this point I would suggest to look at the documentation to see what you can do with cURL including the FAQ.
I usually use simple test harness such as 'curl http://www.acme.com/api/versions' if you REST API exposes available versions.
You can then start to do more sophisticated tests such as authentication credentials from files (in my case I use a JSON data structure to automatically authenticate to my web service), saving cookies on files (using the the -c option):
With my JSON file as follow: {"login":{"username":"user1","password":"StrongPassword1"}}
The cookie in my case contains a session token that I can reuse between each cURL calls. In the next call I read the cookie (via the -b option):
The output of the command can be saved in a file using the option -o or redirecting our output:
or
Enjoy!
In my next post on this topic, I will explain how to use SSL/TLS and specify GZIP headers to your cURL requests.
I have been using cURL for quickly and conveniently testing RESTFul APIs.
Since I am doing most of my development on Windows platforms, I am using cURL in conjunction with Console, a Windows console window enhancement tool.
First you need to download and install cURL for your platform (windows, Linux ect). Then you can do a quick test by accessible the home page of your favorite web site:
This should display the HTML content of the home page. At this point I would suggest to look at the documentation to see what you can do with cURL including the FAQ.
I usually use simple test harness such as 'curl http://www.acme.com/api/versions' if you REST API exposes available versions.
You can then start to do more sophisticated tests such as authentication credentials from files (in my case I use a JSON data structure to automatically authenticate to my web service), saving cookies on files (using the the -c option):
curl -c ./cookies.txt --data-binary @login_password.json -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://www.acme.com/api/users/token
With my JSON file as follow: {"login":{"username":"user1","password":"StrongPassword1"}}
The cookie in my case contains a session token that I can reuse between each cURL calls. In the next call I read the cookie (via the -b option):
curl -b ./cookies.txt http://www.acme.com/api/users/userid1234567890/orders
The output of the command can be saved in a file using the option -o or redirecting our output:
curl -o google.html www.google.com
or
curl www.google.com > google.html
Enjoy!
In my next post on this topic, I will explain how to use SSL/TLS and specify GZIP headers to your cURL requests.
