
We've seen the vast amount of command line options that are available to use with cURL already. Now, when calling curl, we actually are calling curl -x via the alias meaning we don't have to set it each time. As with environment variables, the shell file which you use to do this will differ. Using this approach, we can substitute the call to curl with our proxy command. An alias can be used to substitute any system command we execute with another. 3: Using an aliasĪnother more permanent approach to configuring a proxy is via an alias which is useful if you always need to regularly connect in this way.

These types of files are first executed when you login and startup an instance of your shell, meaning the environment variable will be assigned and used when we call cURL. zshrc file (for bash and zshell respectively), or could be put in a. In some cases our command would be appended to the bottom of a. Depending on the shell you use and your system, the file you need to place this alias will differ. In order to make it available in all sessions, this could however be appended to a shell startup file. One limitation of this approach is that it is used for all applications that support its use (such as wget), so depending on your use case could lead to problems.Īs with all environment variables set in this way, these are only temporary variables which will be removed at the end of our shell session or if we restart the system.

Meaning we no longer need to remember to supply arguments for the duration of our session. In order to look at the documentation for proxy settings use the following command: cURL has extensive help documentation within it which you can filter for all the options for proxy configuration on the command line. The first and simplest option for using a proxy is to use a command line argument. This service is especially useful as it allows us to see the source of a request when we access the path /ip. For most of the examples here, we're going to be using a GET request made to the developer service. We'll be transferring data to it via HTTP which we'll explicitly specify for completeness. By default, the only required part of a proxy statement is the host and it defaults to using HTTP as the scheme with the default port 80. The proxy we use for our examples in the rest of this article will be set up on our local machine, using port 5000. Therefore being explicit with your arguments is very important. cURL won't try and guide you if you try and supply incorrect URLs or use the wrong protocol - it will simply try and run your command. One of it's driving philosophies is garbage in, garbage out or if it is provided with garbage, then that is what it will return. This gives you a good idea of the level we're working at when interacting with cURL.
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Which now returns the full content of as we'd usually see. It forms the basis of many developer scripts due to its near universal availability on most unix like operating systems and support of a wide variety of protocols including HTTP/HTTPS, FTP and SCP.Ī simple example to get the content of Google would be to simply call cURL against a URL, which will output the content of the webpage to standard output: It allows you to retrieve and send data in a multitude of ways and outputs to standard output to allow it to be used with standard unix pipes. How set up a proxy with cURL?ĬURL is a command line tool used for transferring data which has roots dating all the way back to 1996.

You will learn the different ways to use a proxy with cURL. By using a proxy, we can fetch the data we require based on the locale of the proxy. If we were to visit the site directly, we would end up with data in the wrong currency. On a variety of global shopping sites this approach is used to display prices in a local currency - e.g. We might want to do this when say data on a target service uses geo localization to restrict the data displayed, or completely blocks access to clients in certain countries. The client can forward each command they want to execute to the proxy and then the proxy executes it and returns the result to the client.

A proxy server acts as a middleman between a client and a destination server.
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In this article, you will learn how to use the command line tool cURL to transfer data using a proxy server.
