8/1/23, 19:26 How to Download Files with cURL | DigitalOcean
How to Download Files with cURL
Published on October 4, 2019 · Updated on June 11, 2021
Linux Basics Linux Commands
By joshtronic
Developer and author at DigitalOcean.
Client URL, or cURL, is a library and command-line utility for transferring data between systems. It
supports many protocols and tends to be installed by default on many Unix-like operating systems.
Because of its general availability, it is a great choice for when you need to download a file to your
local system, especially in a server environment.
In this tutorial, you’ll use the curl command to download a text file from a web server. You’ll view
its contents, save it locally, and tell curl to follow redirects if files have moved.
Downloading files off of the Internet can be dangerous, so be sure you are downloading from
reputable sources. In this tutorial you’ll download files from DigitalOcean, and you won’t be
executing any files you download.
Step 1 — Fetching remote files
Out of the box, without any command-line arguments, the curl command will fetch a file and
display its contents to the standard output.
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8/1/23, 19:26 How to Download Files with cURL | DigitalOcean
Let’s give it a try by downloading the robots.txt file from Digitalocean.com:
curl https://www.digitalocean.com/robots.txt
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You’ll see the file’s contents displayed on the screen:
Output
User-agent: *
Disallow:
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/sitemap.xml
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/main_sitemap.xml.gz
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions_sitemap.xml.gz
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/users_sitemap.xml.gz
Give curl a URL and it will fetch the resource and display its contents.
Saving Remote Files
Fetching a file and display its contents is all well and good, but what if you want to actually save
the file to your system?
To save the remote file to your local system, with the same filename as the server you’re
downloading from, add the --remote-name argument, or use the -O option:
curl -O https://www.digitalocean.com/robots.txt
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Your file will download:
Output
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 286 0 286 0 0 5296 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 5296
Instead of displaying the contents of the file, curl displays a text-based progress meter and saves
the file to the same name as the remote file’s name. You can check on things with
the cat command:
cat robots.txt
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The file contains the same contents you saw previously:
Output
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8/1/23, 19:26 How to Download Files with cURL | DigitalOcean
User-agent: *
Disallow:
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/sitemap.xml
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/main_sitemap.xml.gz
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions_sitemap.xml.gz
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/users_sitemap.xml.gz
Now let’s look at specifying a filename for the downloaded file.
Step 2 — Saving Remote Files with a Specific File Name
You may already have a local file with the same name as the file on the remote server.
To avoid overwriting your local file of the same name, use the -o or --output argument, followed
by the name of the local file you’d like to save the contents to.
Execute the following command to download the remote robots.txt file to the locally named do-
bots.txt file:
curl -o do-bots.txt https://www.digitalocean.com/robots.txt
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Once again you’ll see the progress bar:
Output
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 286 0 286 0 0 6975 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 7150
Now use the cat command to display the contents of do-bots.txt to verify it’s the file you
downloaded:
cat do-bots.txt
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The contents are the same:
Output
User-agent: *
Disallow:
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/sitemap.xml
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/main_sitemap.xml.gz
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions_sitemap.xml.gz
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/users_sitemap.xml.gz
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8/1/23, 19:26 How to Download Files with cURL | DigitalOcean
By default, curl doesn’t follow redirects, so when files move, you might not get what you expect.
Let’s look at how to fix that.
Step 3 — Following Redirects
Thus far all of the examples have included fully qualified URLs that include the https:// protocol.
If you happened to try to fetch the robots.txt file and only specified www.digitalocean.com , you
would not see any output, because DigitalOcean redirects requests from http:// to https:// :
You can verify this by using the -I flag, which displays the request headers rather than the
contents of the file:
curl -I www.digitalocean.com/robots.txt
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The output shows that the URL was redirected. The first line of the output tells you that it was
moved, and the Location line tells you where:
Output
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Cache-Control: max-age=3600
Cf-Ray: 65dd51678fd93ff7-YYZ
Cf-Request-Id: 0a9e3134b500003ff72b9d0000000001
Connection: keep-alive
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2021 19:41:37 GMT
Expires: Fri, 11 Jun 2021 20:41:37 GMT
Location: https://www.digitalocean.com/robots.txt
Server: cloudflare
. . .
You could use curl to make another request manually, or you can use the --location or -
L argument which tells curl to redo the request to the new location whenever it encounters a
redirect. Give it a try:
curl -L www.digitalocean.com/robots.txt
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This time you see the output, as curl followed the redirect:
Output
User-agent: *
Disallow:
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/sitemap.xml
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/main_sitemap.xml.gz
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions_sitemap.xml.gz
sitemap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/users_sitemap.xml.gz
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You can combine the -L argument with some of the aforementioned arguments to download the
file to your local system:
curl -L -o do-bots.txt www.digitalocean.com/robots.txt
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Warning: Many resources online will ask you to use curl to download scripts and execute them.
Before you run any scripts you have downloaded, it’s good practice to check their contents before
making them executable and running them. Use the less command to review the code to ensure
it’s something you want to run.
Conclusion
curl lets you quickly download files from a remote system. curl supports many different
protocols and can also make more complex web requests, including interacting with remote APIs
to send and receive data.
You can learn more by viewing the manual page for curl by running man curl .
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