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
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Chris Coyier: Some Amazing Work on CodePen III

    I'm back! David asked me to rope up some of my favorite stuff on CodePen again, which I both love doing, and wince at the thought of having to pick so few favorites. I like a ton of stuff on...

  • By
    jQuery Chosen Plugin

    Without a doubt, my least favorite form element is the SELECT element.  The element is almost unstylable, looks different across platforms, has had inconsistent value access, and disaster that is the result of multiple=true is, well, a disaster.  Needless to say, whenever a developer goes...

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!