Run cURL commands from Windows console

Question

Is there a way to install cURL in windows in order to run cURL commands from the command prompt?

Answer 1

Of course!

Download cURL for Windows from here (and be sure to select it from Win32 - Generic way down on the page). Then place it in a directory inside your PATH environment variable (ie: C:\Windows\System32) or run it with it's full path preceding the executable name. If you place it in a directory that's inside your PATH, make sure to close and then reopen command prompt to make the command available.

Answer 2

If you install Git for Windows you get Curl automatically too. There are some advantages:

• Git takes care of the PATH setup during installation automatically.
• You get the GNU bash, a really powerful shell, in my opinion much better than the native Windows console.
• You get many other useful Linux tools like tail, cat, grep, gzip, pdftotext, less, sort, tar, vim and even Perl.

Answer 3

After installing OpenSSL Light, restart Windows, open Command Prompt, then do a test command like:

curl http://www.google.com

If you get HTML tags back, it worked.

Answer 4

How to setup cURL:

• Download and unzip 64-bit cURL with SSL.
• Copy the curl.exe file into your Windows PATH folder. By default, this is C:\Windows\System32.
• Download and install the Visual Studio 2010 C++ Runtime Redistributable 64 bit here.
• Download the latest bundle of Certficate Authority Public Keys from mozilla.org here.
• Rename this file from cacert.pem to curl-ca-bundle.crt.
• Move this file into your Windows PATH folder.

How to test it:

• Run cmd.exe to open your command prompt.
• For both commands, you should see a couple pages of the HTML source code. If you see this, cURL is up and running!