University of Connecticut

University Information Technolgy Services

Central Web Server 2

Using Curl

Curl is a command line program useful for downloading and uploading files to the Webserver. It is freely available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Below we show a few different ways to use curl.

Downloading a file

You can download the file at at a given url like this

This will download the file myfile.html to your current directory. Instead, you can just display the file on the screen if you omit the -O.

Downloading a file from a secure directory

You can download a file from a secure directory (more information about secure directories here) like this

Replace USER and PASSWORD with your user name and password. The -k option tells Curl to accept the servers SSL certificate without verification. This is sometimes necessary when your client does not have a copy of the correct SSL authority certificate. The -O option causes the file to be written to disk.

Downloading a file from a web site using WebDAV

You can download a file from a web site if you have WebDAV access with the following command

Replace USER and PASSWORD with your user name and password. The -k option tells Curl to accept the servers SSL certificate without verfication. This is sometimes necessary when your client does not have a copy of the correct SSL authority certificate. The -O option causes the file to be written to disk.

Uploading a file to a web site using WebDAV

You can upload a file from a web site if you have WebDAV access with the following command

Replace USER and PASSWORD with your user name and password. This will upload file LOCAL_FILE on your system to the website mysite, and store it at mynewfile. The -k option tells Curl to accept the servers SSL certificate without verfication. This is sometimes necessary when your client does not have copy of the correct SSL authority certificate.