Follow Redirects with cURL
I love playing around with cURL. There's something about loading websites via command line that makes me feel like some type of smug hacker, just like tweeting from command line does.
I recently cURL'd the Google homepage and saw the following:
curl google.com
#<HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
#<TITLE>301 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
#<H1>301 Moved</H1>
#The document has moved
#<A HREF="http://www.google.com/">here</A>.
#</BODY></HTML>
I found it weird that Google does the initial redirect but I still want to get the source of the Google homepage with cURL, as with any site that may do a redirect without you noticing. Luckily it's just a single flag:
curl -L google.com
#<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage" lang="en">...
The -L flag instructs cURL to follow any redirect so that you reach the eventual endpoint. Those tiny redirects are just noise anyways, right?
![Write Better JavaScript with Promises]()
You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...
![CSS @supports]()
Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS. What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix. Yuck. Another thing we...
![Introducing MooTools NextPrev]()
One thing I love doing is duplicating OS functionalities. One of the things your OS allows you to do easily is move from one item to another. Most of the time you're simply trying to get to the next or the previous item.
![Facebook Open Graph META Tags]()
It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites. Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly. And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website. One...
Is there a way to do this outside of the command line in PHP?
The curl-lib in PHP offers an option for that:
And if the url is using/forcing https, set this option before executing the curl:
Please don’t do that, unless you really don’t care about the content of the download. It essentially says “Ignore the SSL errors if it’s broken – trust the same as you would an unencrypted URL.”
The data will still be encrypted, but could be coming from a man-in-the-middle, not from where you thing it’s coming from.
The implementation of curl in PHP has an option for that.
See the following link:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3519939/make-curl-follow-redirects
if you liked curl, you’ll love lynx..
I hit an issue with not following redirects myself, but this was a download from a GitHub release download that was redirecting to a S3 bucket. Broke a CLI out in the wild…
In this case, I’m not sure it’s noise (to get at your closing question). I was intentionally not following redirects, as one should not expect this to be happening with GitHub downloads…
I have a support ticket in to see what’s up with this very recent change. Maybe it was a DevOops?