Run cURL commands from Windows console

Question

Is there a way to install cURL in windows in order to run cURL commands from the command prompt?

Solution 1

Download cURL for Windows from here (and be sure to select it from Win32 - Generic way down on the page).

Then place it in a directory inside your PATH environment variable (ie: C:\Windows\System32) or run it with its full path preceding the executable name.

If you place it in a directory that's inside your PATH, make sure to close and then reopen command prompt to make the command available.

Solution 2

If you install Git for Windows you get Curl automatically too. There are some advantages:

• Git takes care of the PATH setup during installation automatically.
• You get the GNU bash, a really powerful shell, in my opinion much better than the native Windows console.
• You get many other useful Linux tools like tail, cat, grep, gzip, pdftotext, less, sort, tar, vim and even Perl.

Solution 3

After installing OpenSSL Light, restart Windows, open Command Prompt, then do a test command like:

curl http://www.google.com

If you get HTML tags back, it worked.

Solution 4

How to setup cURL:

• Download and unzip 64-bit cURL with SSL.
• Copy the curl.exe file into your Windows PATH folder. By default, this is C:\Windows\System32.
• Download and install the Visual Studio 2010 C++ Runtime Redistributable 64 bit here.
• Download the latest bundle of Certficate Authority Public Keys from mozilla.org here.
• Rename this file from cacert.pem to curl-ca-bundle.crt.
• Move this file into your Windows PATH folder.

How to test it:

• Run cmd.exe to open your command prompt.
• For both commands, you should see a couple pages of the HTML source code. If you see this, cURL is up and running!

Solution 5

For folks that don't literally need the curl executable, but rather just need to e.g. see or save the results of a GET request, can use powershell directly. From a normal command prompt, type:

powershell -Command "(new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('http://example.com')"

which, while a bit wordy, is similar to typing

curl http://example.com/

in a more Unix-ish environment.

More information about net.webclient is available here: WebClient Methods (System.Net).

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Comments

[phuclv]

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it was cross-posted on SO

[Eltariel]

You don't need to reopen the console if you put it in a directory on the path, you only need to do that if you change the PATH variable.

[CAD bloke]

One hard reboot later because I couldn't kill the task - um, you might wanna be careful with this.

[pedrommuller]

worked like a charm!

[CodyBugstein]

Related; can you also install libraries for https?

[cchamberlain]

This is probably the best all around solution since git is useful for many of the things that curl does but source wise.

[Diode Dan]

If you have Git, this is a great solution

[Armfoot]

Exactly what I was looking for! I actually used the DownloadFile method: powershell -Command "(new-object net.webclient).DownloadFile('http://.../somefile', 'file.txt')". You also just taught me how to use the PowerShell without opening its prompt. Thank you matty!

[dev0]

Newer versions of git-for-windows do not come with curl in the path, you have to run /mingw64/bin/curl.