How to Install and Use Curl on CentOS 8

Curl tool is used for transfer data from or to a server. It can be use to download or upload files with one of the supported protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, and FTP. This article explains how to install curl on CentOS 8 system.

The wget command is alternative way of curl to transfer the files. If you are trying to use curl command and get error message like bash: curl: command not found it means that the curl package is not installed on your CentOS machine.

Step 1 – Install Curl on CentOS#

By default, CentOS repositories includes Curl package. Run the below command to install curl as root or user with sudo privileges:

sudo apt install curl

Step 2 – Verify Installation#

Once the installation is finished, you can verify installation by typing curl in your terminal:

curl

It should show output as below:

curl: try 'curl --help' or 'curl --manual' for more information

That’s it! You have successfully installed curl on your CentOS machine, and you can use it.

Step 3 – Using Curl#

If you would like to view source code of any url simply follow url by curl command and hit Enter key:

curl https://google.com/

You can download file using -o or -O flags with curl command. By using lowercase -o option you can specify the name of the saved file as given below:

curl -o go.tar.gz https://dl.google.com/go/go1.14.2.darwin-amd64.tar.gz

Option -O (uppercase) will be used to store file with its original name:

curl -O https://dl.google.com/go/go1.14.2.darwin-amd64.tar.gz

Using curl you can see the headers of any given URL. Use the -I option with curl to display the HTTP headers. For example, if you want to show headers of https://www.google.com/ run below command:

curl -I https://www.google.com/

It will show output as following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 03 May 2020 11:49:57 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See g.co/p3phelp for more info."
Server: gws
X-XSS-Protection: 0
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Alt-Svc: h3-Q050=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-Q049=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-Q048=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-Q046=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-Q043=":443"; ma=2592000,quic=":443"; ma=2592000; v="46,43"
Accept-Ranges: none
Vary: Accept-Encoding

To get more help for curl command type man command:

man curl

OR

curl --help

Conclusion#

You successfully learned how to install Curl on CentOS 8 system. For more information about how to use this tool, visit Curl Command Examples.

If you have any questions or suggestion, feel free to leave comment below.