Curl Reference

Articles & Help Links

Title	URL
The Art of Scripting HTTP Requests Using cURL	https://curl.se/docs/httpscripting.html
cURL Docs	https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html
The cURL guide to HTTP requests	https://flaviocopes.com/http-curl/
The simplest guide to cURL for REST API requests	https://dev.to/ritaly/the-simplest-guide-to-curl-for-rest-api-requests-35ii
cURL - The Ultimate Reference Guide	https://www.petergirnus.com/blog/curl-command-line-ultimate-reference-guide
How to use cURL on Windows	https://4sysops.com/archives/how-to-use-curl-on-windows/#rtoc-2

Note

The Windows curl command does not use -X to denote request methods. For example, instead of -X POST, Windows expects -XPOST.

Alternatively on Windows, use curl.exe instead of curl, which should have native support and function similarly to the UNIX version of cURL.

Making Requests with cURL

Tip

Add -v to any cURL request to show verbose output

GET

curl https://api.restful-api.dev/objects

With params:

curl https://api.restful-api.dev/objects/1/

OR

curl https://api.restful-api.dev/objects?id=3

With multiple params:

curl "https://dev.to/api/articles?tag=devjournal&top=5&per_page=5"

POST

Use -X POST to denote a POST request. Add a body with -d.

Add request headers with -H.

Add a useragent string with -A

curl -X POST https://api.restful-api.dev/objects \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"name":"Apple MacBook Pro 16","data":{"year":2019,"price":2049.99,"CPU model":"Intel Core i9","Hard disk size":"1 TB","color":"silver"}}'

With headers:

curl -v \
     -H 'Connection: keep-alive' \
     -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' \
     -H 'Accept-Language: en-GB,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6' \
     https://api.restful-api.dev/objects

With headers and a useragent

curl -v \
     -H 'Connection: keep-alive' \
     -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' \
     -H 'Accept-Language: en-GB,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6' \
-A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36' \
     https://api.restful-api.dev/objects

PUT

Use -X PUT to denote a PUT request

curl -X PUT https://api.restful-api.dev/objects/:id \
     -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     -d '{"name":"Apple MacBook Pro 16","data":{"year":2022,"price":2399.99,"CPU model":"M1","Hard disk size":"1 TB","color":"space grey"}}'

PATCH

Use -X PATCH to denote a PATCH request

curl -X PATCH https://api.restful-api.dev/objects/:id \
     -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     -d '{"name":"Fruity name"}'

DELETE

Use -X DELETE to denote a DELETE request

curl -X DELETE https://api.restful-api.dev/objects/:id

Save request as .json for inspection

## File will be saved to ./request.json
curl -X POST https://api.restful-api.dev/objects \
     -d @request.json \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json"

Save response to a .json file

curl https://api.restful-api.dev/objects -o response.json

Last updated on April 13, 2026