Bash script curl input variable from command line

Question

I would like to be able to pass in what environment when script is run. Like script.sh dev ($dev would populate appropriate URL in curl command in script).
Maybe even print the environment as options to pass?

#!/bin/bash # Environment/URL dev=myurl.myco.com tst=myurl.myco.com tst02=myurl.myco.com tst03=myurl.myco.com qa01=myurl.myco.com request=`curl -L -k -H 'Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded' -H 'cache-control:no-cache' -X https://$tst/bla/bla/bla/bla 2>/dev/null` 

Answer 1

Since you are using Bash, you may make use of associative arrays (introduced in bash-4.0-alpha¹).

You can define the script:

#!/bin/bash declare -A urls urls[dev]=dev.example.com urls[tst]=test.example.com request="$(curl ... https://"${urls["$1"]}"/foo/bar ...)" 

And invoke it as:

script dev 

The first positional parameter ($1) will be used as the key for retrieving a URL from the urls array.

As a (more user friendly) variation, as suggested by DopeGhoti, script may be:

#!/bin/bash declare -A urls urls[dev]=dev.example.com urls[tst]=test.example.com select opt in "${!urls[@]}"; do [ ! -z "$opt" ] && break done request="$(curl ... https://"${urls["$opt"]}"/foo/bar ...)" 

Which is meant to be invoked as:

script 

The select command presents the user with the list of the keys defined for the urls array and ensures that a valid key is chosen.

Finally, as a way to separate concerns, you may store your URLs in a plain text file, here named urlfile, formatted as:

dev dev.example.com tst test.example.com 

and load its content into the script's urls array with a read loop:

#!/bin/bash declare -A urls while read -r label url; do urls["$label"]="$url" done <urlfile select opt in "${!urls[@]}"; do [ ! -z "$opt" ] && break done request="$(curl ... https://"${urls["$opt"]}"/foo/bar ...)" 

Note: even if not necessary, I chose the $(...) command substitution syntax (instead of ` `) because it is generally more versatile.

---

¹ _{With this commit from 2011. Bash 4.0+ is now widely available.}