How To Install And Use Curl On Debian 10
This guide explains how to install and use the curl command on Debian 10, Buster.
If you are trying to download a file using curl and getting an error message saying curl command not found it simply means that the curl package is not installed on your Debian System.
Curl is a command-line utility for transferring data from or to a remote server. It allows you to download or upload data using HTTP, HTTPS, SCP , SFTP , and FTP protocols.
Installing Curl on Debian
Curl package is included in the default Debian 10 repositories, to install it run the following command:
sudo apt install curl
To verify that curl has been installed, type curl in your terminal, and press Enter:
curl
The command will print the following output:
curl: try 'curl --help' or 'curl --manual' for more information
That’s it! You have successfully installed curl on your Debian machine, and you can start using it.
Using Curl
When used without any option, curl prints the source code of the URL specified as an argument to the standard output:
curl https://example.com
To download a file with curl, use either the -o or -O flags.
The lowercase -o option allows you to specify the name of the saved file:
curl -o linux.tar.xz https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.0.5.tar.xz
Uppercase -O saves the file with its original filename:
curl -O https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/linux-5.0.5.tar.xz
Another useful feature of Curl is its ability to display the HTTP headers of a given URL:
curl -I https://www.debian.org/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2019 21:22:30 GMT Server: Apache Content-Location: index.en.html Vary: negotiate,accept-language,Accept-Encoding,cookie TCN: choice X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff X-Frame-Options: sameorigin Referrer-Policy: no-referrer X-Xss-Protection: 1 Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=15552000 Last-Modified: Mon, 09 Sep 2019 08:52:31 GMT ETag: "38e4-5921ae8851520" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 14564 Cache-Control: max-age=86400 Expires: Tue, 10 Sep 2019 21:22:30 GMT X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett Content-Type: text/html Content-Language: en
With Curl you can also download files from FTP servers that are password protected:
curl -u FTP_USERNAME:FTP_PASSWORD ftp://ftp.example.com/file.tar.gz
Conclusion
Curl is a versatile tool that allows you to send and receive data over the network. Installing Curl on Debian is a pretty simple task.
