What is curl used for?

curl is used in command lines or scripts to transfer data. curl is also libcurl, used in cars, television sets, routers, printers, audio equipment, mobile phones, tablets, medical devices, settop boxes, computer games, media players and is the Internet transfer engine for countless software applications in over twenty billion installations.

curl is used daily by virtually every Internet-using human on the globe.

curl supports

Protocols	DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET, TFTP, WS, WSS
Proxies	SOCKS4, SOCKS5, HTTP, HTTPS (HTTP/1 and HTTP/2), tunneling, via unix domain sockets, haproxy, SOCKS+HTTP proxy chain
HTTP	GET, POST, PUT, HEAD, multipart formpost, HTTP/0.9, HTTP/1.0, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 (h2c, h2, prior knowledge), HTTP/3 (dual connect h1/h2 + h3 or h3-only), HSTS, Alt-Svc, cookies, PSL, etags, transfer compression, ranges, custom headers, custom method, follow redirects
FTP	IPv6 (EPRT, EPSV), STLS, upload/download, append, range, passive/active, kerberos, directory listing, custom commands
SCP + SFTP	known hosts, md5/sha256 fingerprint, compression, upload/download, directory listing
TLS	1.0 - 1.3, mutual authentication, STARTTLS, OCSP stapling, ECH, False Start, key pinning, PQC ready, session resumption, early data, export/import sessions
QUIC	0RTT handshakes
Auth	Basic, Plain, Digest, CRAM-MD5, SCRAM-SHA, NTLM, Negotiate, Kerberos, Bearer tokens, AWS Sigv4, SASL, .netrc
HTTP compression	gzip, brotli and zstd
Name resolving	DNS-over-HTTPS, custom address for host, name+port redirect, custom DNS servers, DNS caching, HTTPS RR
Connection	connection reuse, Interface binding, Happy Eyeballs, IPv4/IPv6-only, unix domain sockets, TCP keepalive, TCP Fast Open, TCP Nodelay, MPTCP, VLAN priority, IP Type Of Service
Transfers	transfer rate limiting, request rate limiting, stall detection, retries, timeouts
URLs	Unlimited amount, parallel and serial transfers, globbing
Output	IDN hostnames, custom info from transfer, metadata as JSON, per content-disposition, libcurl source code, bold headers

Who makes curl?

curl is free and open source software and exists thanks to thousands of contributors and our awesome sponsors. The curl project follows well established open source best practices. You too can help us improve!

What is the latest curl?

The most recent stable version is 8.13.0, released on 2025-04-02. Currently, 105 of the listed downloads are of the latest version.

Where is the code?

Check out the latest source code from GitHub.