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?
![Conquering Impostor Syndrome]()
Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense. I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions. I've even caught myself reading the post...
![Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools]()
MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does. Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up. I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own. In any event...
![Drag and Drop MooTools File Uploads]()
Honesty hour confession: file uploading within the web browser sucks. It just does. Like the ugly SELECT element, the file input is almost unstylable and looks different on different platforms. Add to those criticism the fact that we're all used to drag and drop operations...
![Degradable SELECT onChange]()
Whenever I go to Google Analytics I notice a slight flicker in the dropdown list area. I see a button appear for the shortest amount of time and the poof! Gone. What that tells me is that Google is making their site function...
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?