cURL setup and OpenSSL

In a previous post I was explaining how to use cURL to quickly test REST web services. If your web service has to be secure, you are probably using Transport Layer Security (TLS) - the new Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) cryptographic protocol.

To be able to use TLS/SSL with cURL, you will need to have some SSL libraries/DLL such as OpenSSL installed. If you did not install OpenSSL, you will most likely get the following error when trying to use cURL:

"The program can't start because LIBEAY32.dll is missing from your computer. Try to reinstall the program to fix this problem."

To fix this, you can either install the OpenSSL on your machine, or if you just want to install the minimum, you can just copy the following DLLs from OpenSSL (I am using OpenSSL 1.0.0c) to your cURL folder:

• libeay32.dll
• ssleay32.dll

By the way, you can download cURL for most of the OS and platforms and usually SSL and non SSL versions are available for each OS (see current windows versions below):