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
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Google Extension Effect with CSS or jQuery or MooTools JavaScript

    Both of the two great browser vendors, Google and Mozilla, have Extensions pages that utilize simple but classy animation effects to enhance the page. One of the extensions used by Google is a basic margin-top animation to switch between two panes: a graphic pane...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools HeatMap

    It's often interesting to think about where on a given element, whether it be the page, an image, or a static DIV, your users are clicking.  With that curiosity in mind, I've created HeatMap: a MooTools class that allows you to detect, load, save, and...

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!