curl Installation

Installation hints

The examples and exercises in this course rely on a handful of handy tools and utilities. This appendix is a short guide to locating and safely installing these tools on our local machine. Most of the installation routines are pretty straightforward. However, a couple of them are involved because the tools are supported on many different operating systems and involve multiple versions. We’ve tried to provide additional advice along the way to help steer you through any potential problems.

We advise that you stick to installing these tools from the web locations mentioned in this appendix. Many of these utilities are free, open-source software products, and some versions of them may be hosted on private web pages. But there’s a slight chance that these unofficial download pages will serve up versions of the software with added trackers or even malicious code injected into the download. For that reason, be careful when you install software from nonstandard locations on the web.

All the instructions assume you have access rights to installing software on your local machine. In some cases, you may need to get additional permission to do this. You may also need to check with your local hardware administrator for details.

Note: You don’t need to install all the utilities mentioned here before you start this course.

The curl utility

The curl utility is basically a command-line browser. As we discuss in Getting Started with API-First, we’ll use curl to make API calls from the command line throughout the course.

Checking for curl

You may have curl already installed on your machine. You can check this by typing the following in a command-line window:

$> curl

If it’s installed, you should get the following response:

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