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Making POST Requests with cURL

cURL is a package that contains various tools for transferring data between remote servers. It supports FTP, Windows Shares, Mail Servers, and of course Web Servers using HTTP.

Downloading a file from the Linux shell is usually accomplished using the cURL command like so:

curl http://example.org/file.zip --output file.zip

This makes the request for the file using the GET method and simply downloads it.

This article will detail how to use cURL to make a POST request, including form data. This may be useful if the server requires credentials to download a file, or if you are building an automated script to submit data to a web form for storage in a database.

It will also touch on submitting XML or JSON data from a file for use with a REST API.

POSTing URL Encoded Fields using cURL

For our examples, we will be submitting the following form data:

Field Name Value
field1 value1
field2 value2

The data will be submitted to the URL https://example.org/submit.phpAddresses on example.org do not really exist, it’s just a web domain we can safely use for examples. submit.php is also an example name for a form submit script and doesn’t reference anything specific.

Form data can be passed to the POST request as a single string with each form field and its value defined by name=value, and separating them with & using the –data option:

curl --data "field1=value1&field2=value2" https://example.org/submit.php

However, this is not ideal, as it requires URL encoded data – that is, data which has had the spaces and slashes replaced with special codes to format them for sending over HTTP. You could do this manually, but cURL can do it for you using –data-urlencode:

curl --data-urlencode "field1=value1&field2=value2" https://example.org/submit.php

Field names are not URL encoded – if you wish to encode them prefix them with an =:

curl --data-urlencode "=user name=Linus Torvalds" http://example.org

We’ll use –data-urlencode for the following examples instead of –data for making POST requests to make things easy.

URL Encoded Fields Specified Separately

Each form field name/value can be passed separately – it makes things much simpler to read:

curl --data-urlencode "field1=value1" --data-urlencode "field2=value2" https://example.org/submit.php

Multipart/File Upload using cURL

Multipart form requests, including files, can be submitted via POST using the –form option. The below example will upload myfile.txt to the fileupload form field:

curl --form "[email protected]" https://example.org/submit.php

Multipart with Fields and Files, and Filenames

The form field name and value pairs can also be included with a file upload, and a filename for an uploaded file if you wish to change it:

curl --form "[email protected];filename=newfilename.txt" --form field1=value1 --form field2=value2 https://example.org/submit.php

Without Data

To make a POST request without any data, simply pass an empty string:

curl --data-urlencode '' https://example.org/submit.php

Showing File Upload Progress

To keep an eye on how an upload is progressing, add an -o output option to show a progress bar:

curl --tr-encoding -X POST -v -# -o output -T myfile.dat http://example.org/submit.php

Submitting Data Stored in a File

If uploading data already stored in a file, it can all be submitted at once, rather than parsing it out into a cURL command:

curl --data-urlencode [email protected] http://example.org/submit.php

JSON and XML data can be POSTed for programmatic API services by adding the appropriate headers:

curl -X POST --data-urlencode @myfile.txt http://example.org/submit.php --header "Content-Type:text/xml"

curl -X POST --data-urlencode @myfile.txt http://example.org/submit.php --header "Content-Type:application/json"

Conclusion

Mastering cURL is important if you are frequently working on the Linux command line. It can perform many tasks for which you might usually need a full web browser, in addition to its uses interacting with programmatic APIs and for transferring data to and from your own servers.

Check out our other Linux shell and scripting articles here!

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I'm Brad, and I'm nearing 20 years of experience with Linux. I've worked in just about every IT role there is before taking the leap into software development. Currently, I'm building desktop and web-based solutions with NodeJS and PHP hosted on Linux infrastructure. Visit my blog or find me on Twitter to see what I'm up to.

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