How to Open a Website from Terminal

By  on  

Every once in a while I want to open a website from the terminal ... just because.  Maybe it's because it makes me feel just a bit more hardcore, you know, not clicking a GUI icon.  Anyways, opening a browser via the command line is dead simple:

open https://davidwalsh.name

That execution will open the URL in the system's default browser.  If your prefer a specific browser, you can so specify:

open -a "Google Chrome Canary" http://cnn.com

Open a URL from the command line -- you'll feel like a true pro.

Recent Features

  • By
    How to Create a RetroPie on Raspberry Pi – Graphical Guide

    Today we get to play amazing games on our super powered game consoles, PCs, VR headsets, and even mobile devices.  While I enjoy playing new games these days, I do long for the retro gaming systems I had when I was a kid: the original Nintendo...

  • By
    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...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ScrollSidebar

    How many times are you putting together a HTML navigation block or utility block of elements that you wish could be seen everywhere on a page? I've created a solution that will seamlessly allow you to do so: ScrollSidebar. ScrollSidebar allows you...

  • By
    Duplicate the jQuery Homepage Tooltips Using MooTools

    The jQuery homepage has a pretty suave tooltip-like effect as seen below: Here's how to accomplish this same effect using MooTools. The XHTML The above XHTML was taken directly from the jQuery homepage -- no changes. The CSS The above CSS has been slightly modified to match the CSS rules already...

Discussion

  1. Geopelia

    Like i child…

  2. danny

    Since aliasing gitwww to open the current github repo’s home page, ive saved prob. 2 mins/day. Plus is saves my fingers a trip to the mouse!

    • Ollie

      could you share how you made the alias dynamic to access the current repo’s homepage?

  3. I thought you’re gonna use lynx :))

  4. open didnt work :(
    but start did :) in windows environment

  5. Heh, you got me there! I thought you wrote an article about lynx :-) Thanks for sharing though, it’s especially useful when grabbing stuff using curl or wget…

  6. these days in zsh on OSX you need to wrap the url in quotes

    open 'https://davidwalsh.name/open-website-terminal'
    

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!