I've been watching a series that showcases using curl to interact with websites, and I'm really intrigued. I understand the basics of how Bash scripts work, but I'm a bit lost when it comes to the server-side configuration. I tried using curl on a website, and I only got plain HTML in return. I'm interested in creating something similar but I'm not sure where to start. What steps should I take, and are there any resources or learning materials you'd recommend?
1 Answer
Curl works kind of like how a web browser does. When you want to access a webpage, the browser sends an HTTP request to the server asking for data. The server processes this request and sends back an HTTP response with the appropriate content. Curl does the same thing, but it returns the raw HTML without rendering it. It’s really important to understand the HTTP protocol, so looking into that will help you immensely. There are lots of resources online; one good one I recently found is here: https://eblog.fly.dev/index.html
Thanks for the resource! I'll definitely check it out.