How to installcurl on Windows: On Windows 10 or newer, curl comes with an operating system. The executable file curl.exe is located in the C:\Windows\System32 folder and is accordingly accessible through the PATH environment variable and can be called from anywhere. To use curl you need to run command prompt as administrator and execute curl command.
For older versions of Windows 7 and 8, you need to download and unpack curl from the official website. In bin folder, you will find curl.exe file and libcurl library.
You can add the bin folder to your PATH environment variable so that you can execute curl commands from anywhere.
Methods
What is a Curl on Windows?
Curl is a command-line tool for transferring data to and from a client or server, designed to work without user interaction. With curl, you can upload or download data using any of the supported protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, and FTP.
Curl provides options for bandwidth limiting, proxy support, user authentication, and has built-in support for SSL, certificate verification, and HTTP cookies. curl works on all modern platforms like Windows, Linux and MacOS.
How to install Curl on Windows 10 or 11?
Windows 10 already has curl, but for Windows 7 and 8, you still need to download and install curl from the official website. Ways to install curl on Windows:
Download pre-compiled binaries
Download curl from the official site and unzip it, for example, into the C:\Curl directory. The curl.exe file will be located in the C:\Curl\bin directory. Add C:\Curl\bin to your PATH environment variable so Windows can find curl.exe without specifying the full path.
2. Install curl using the Chocolatey Windows package manager
After installing the Chocolatey package manager, run the following command:
install curl with chocolatey install choco curl-y
3. Install curl with cygwin
CYGWIN is a Unix-like environment for Windows, and a pre-compiled project for Unix tools. To use curl as part of CYGWIN, you must first download the CYGWIN installer and run it. During the installation process, you will see a list of installation packages. Make sure you have selected the curl package.4.
4. Install Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
Starting with Windows 10, Microsoft released a product called Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). WSL is based on Ubuntu Linux. Using WSL gives you a complete Linux environment instead of CYGWIN, just a collection of utilities from Linux. After you install WSL, go to the Start menu, click on Bash, and you can use all your favorite Linux tools, including curl.
5. compile curl from source code
You can build curl yourself from the source code. This is the most complicated installation method. You can find instructions on compiling curl from source code here.
In some cases, you may need to set up curl manually in Windows.
curl syntax The curl command uses the following syntax:
curl [options...] [url]
It supports various options, which we will discuss later in this post. Like any other command-line tool, you can use the curl -help command to get help.
Getting help with the curl command
To get detailed help, you can use curl -help all. The help section is divided into categories, so the curl-help category gives you an overview of all the categories.
Now that you are familiar with curl syntax, let us discuss the various use cases with the help of examples.
HTTP GET request When you use curl against a URL without specifying any options, the request defaults to the GET method of the HTTP protocol. try this:
curl https://computertopic.com
The above command is essentially equivalent to curl -request GET https://computertopic.com , which sends a GET request to computertopic.com using the HTTPS protocol. To specify the HTTP protocol version (for example, http/2), use the -http2 option, as shown below:
curl --http2 https://computertopic.com
For URLs beginning with HTTPS, curl first attempts to negotiate to establish an http/2 connection and automatically falls back to http/1.1 if negotiation fails. It also supports other methods like HEAD, POST, PUT and DELETE. To use these methods, with the curl command, use the -request (or -X) option after the method. Note that the available methods depend on the protocol being used.
Conclusion
Curl is a useful command-line tool for testing APIs, performing various tasks and troubleshooting, and downloading files. Curl is available, highly customizable, and works on Windows, Linux, Mac. Windows 10 already includes curl in its ints installation package, and for Windows 7 and 8, you will need to download and install curl manually using one of the methods described in this article.
