CURL is a command line utility used on GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS to transfer and receive data over various protocols, including HTTPS, SMP, FTP, SFTP, alt-svc, CA Extract, HSTS, SSL Certs and many more.
All transfer-related functionality in CURL is powered by libcurl, which is a client-side URL transfer library.
How to install CURL on Windows
- On Windows, create a directory named curl on the C drive:
- Open your browser, go to https://curl.se/windows and download one of the following files depending if your Windows is 64-bit (curl for 64-bit) or if your Windows is 32-bit (curl for 32-bit).
- Once downloaded, go to the download directory and unzip the ZIP file.
- Enter the unzipped folder and go inside the bin directory, there you will have four files (curl.exe, curl-ca-bundle, libcurl-x64.def and libcurl-x64.dll) Copy them inside C:/curl.
- Once this is done, you have to add the CURL path in a Windows environment variable to make this command available from any location in the command prompt. To do this you will need to go to Start and search for "Edit the system environment variables":
- The System Properties will open, go to Advanced > Environment Variables.... Select the Path environment variable and click on Edit....:
- Then click New and add the path to the CURL executable: C:\curl. Then click OK to add the new path to the path.
- Now to check that it is working properly, open a Command Prompt as administrator and run the following:
curl --version