7 Uses of cURL: Testing Your APIs Conveniently
You don’t need to download Postman at all
Trying some APIs is a common operation for software developers. Postman is a famous GUI tool for this purpose.
However, life is not always easy, is it? You probably cannot use a pretty GUI tool in some scenarios. To list a few:
- You are using a remote Linux server and there is no GUI interface.
- In some corporations, the security standard is quite high and you are not allowed to download third-party software on your working machine.
- You just don’t want to download too much software on your computer.
No GUI tools can save your life all the time. This is why you should master the cURL.
The curl is a command-line tool for transferring data specified with URL syntax. It literally supports lots of network protocols, but the most common usage is sending HTTP requests. In this article, I’ll introduce 8 essential uses of it and that would be enough for you to uninstall Postman. After all, a real hacker (in movies) doesn’t use any GUI stuff at all.
0. Make an HTTP GET Request
By default, executing a curl command with a domain name will make an HTTP GET request to it.
