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?
![Introducing MooTools Templated]()
One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating:
new Element Madness
The first way to create UI-driven...
![Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS]()
Introduction
For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular.
In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...
![CSS Tooltips]()
We all know that you can make shapes with CSS and a single HTML element, as I've covered in my CSS Triangles and CSS Circles posts. Triangles and circles are fairly simply though, so as CSS advances, we need to stretch the boundaries...
![Create a Simple Slideshow Using MooTools]()
One excellent way to add dynamism to any website is to implement a slideshow featuring images or sliding content. Of course there are numerous slideshow plugins available but many of them can be overkill if you want to do simple slideshow without controls or events.
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?