path: root/docs/TheArtOfHttpScripting

Author:  Daniel Stenberg <daniel@haxx.se>
Date:    August 7, 2000
Version: 0.2

                The Art Of Scripting HTTP Requests Using Curl
                =============================================

 This document will assume that you're familiar with HTML and general
 networking.

 The possibility to write scripts is essential to make a good computer
 system. Unix' capability to be extended by shell scripts and various tools to
 run various automated commands and scripts is one reason why it has succeeded
 so well.

 The increasing amount of applications moving to the web has made "HTTP
 Scripting" more frequently requested and wanted. To be able to automatically
 extract information from the web, to fake users, to post or upload data to
 web servers are all important tasks today.

 Curl is a command line tool for doing all sorts of URL manipulations and
 transfers, but this particular document will focus on how to use it when
 doing HTTP requests for fun and profit. I'll assume that you know how to
 invoke 'curl --help' or 'curl --manual' to get basic information about it.

 Curl is not written to do everything for you. It makes the requests, it gets
 the data, it sends data and it retrieves the information. You probably need
 to glue everything together using some kind of script language or repeated
 manual invokes.

1. The HTTP Protocol

 HTTP is the protocol used to fetch data from web servers. It is a very simple
 protocol that is built upon TCP/IP. The protocol also allow information to
 get sent to the server from the client using a few different methods, as will
 be shown here.

 HTTP is plain ASCII text lines being sent by the client to a server to
 request a particular action, and then the server replies a few text lines
 before the actual requested content is sent to the client.

 Using curl's option -v will display what kind of commands curl sends to the
 server, as well as a few other informational texts. -v is the single most
 useful option when it comes to debug or even understand the curl<->server
 interaction.

2. URL

 The Uniform Resource Locator format is how you specify the address of a
 particular resource on the internet. You know these, you've seen URLs like
 http://curl.haxx.se or https://yourbank.com a million times.

3. GET a page

 The simplest and most common request/operation made using HTTP is to get a
 URL. The URL could itself refer to a web page, an image or a file. The client
 issues a GET request to the server and receives the document it asked for.
 If you isse the command line

        curl http://curl.haxx.se

 you get a web page returned in your terminal window. The entire HTML document
 that that URL holds.

 All HTTP replies contain a set of headers that are normally hidden, use
 curl's -i option to display them as well as the rest of the document. You can
 also ask the remote server for ONLY the headers by using the -I option.

4. Forms

 Forms are the general way a web site can present a HTML page with fields for
 the user to enter data in, and then press some kind of 'OK' or 'submit'
 button to get that data sent to the server. The server then typically uses
 the posted data to decide how to act. Like using the entered words to search
 in a database, or to add the info in a bug track system, display the entered
 address on a map or using the info as a login-prompt verifying that the user
 is allowed to see what it is about to see.

 Of course there has to be some kind of program in the server end to receive
 the data you send. You cannot just invent something out of the air.

 4.1 GET

  A GET-form uses the method GET, as specified in HTML like:

        <form method="GET" action="junk.cgi">
          <input type=text name="birthyear">
          <input type=submit name=press value="OK">
        </form>

  In your favourite browser, this form will appear with a text box to fill in
  and a press-button labeled "OK". If you fill in '1905' and press the OK
  button, your browser will then create a new URL to get for you. The URL will
  get "junk.cgi?birthyear=1905&press=OK" appended to the path part of the
  previous URL.

  If the original form was seen on the page "www.hotmail.com/when/birth.html",
  the second page you'll get will become
  "www.hotmail.com/when/junk.cgi?birthyear=1905&press=OK".

  Most search engines work this way.

  To make curl do the GET form post for you, just enter the expected created
  URL:

        curl "www.hotmail.com/when/junk.cgi?birthyear=1905&press=OK"

 4.2 POST

  The GET method makes all input field names get displayed in the URL field of
  your browser. That's generally a good thing when you want to be able to
  bookmark that page with your given data, but it is an obvious disadvantage
  if you entered secret information in one of the fields or if there are a
  large amount of fields creating a very long and unreadable URL.

  The HTTP protocol then offers the POST method. This way the client sends the
  data separated from the URL and thus you won't see any of it in the URL
  address field.

  The form would look very similar to the previous one:

        <form method="POST" action="junk.cgi">
          <input type=text name="birthyear">
          <input type=submit name=press value="OK">
        </form>

  And to use curl to post this form with the same data filled in as before, we
  could do it like:

        curl -d "birthyear=1905&press=OK" www.hotmail.com/when/junk.cgi

  This kind of POST will use the Content-Type
  application/x-www-form-urlencoded and is the most widly used POST kind.

 4.3 FILE UPLOAD POST

  Back in late 1995 they defined a new to post data over HTTP. It was
  documented in the RFC 1867, why this method sometimes are refered to as
  a rfc1867-posting.

  This method is mainly designed to better support file uploads. A form that
  allows a user to upload a file could be written like this in HTML:

    <form method="POST" enctype='multipart/form-data' action="upload.cgi">
      <input type=file name=upload>
      <input type=submit name=press value="OK">
    </form>

  This clearly shows that the Content-Type about to be sent is
  multipart/form-data.

  To post to a form like this with curl, you enter a command line like:

        curl -F upload=@localfilename -F press=OK [URL]

 4.4 HIDDEN FIELDS

  A very common way for HTML based application to pass state information
  between pages is to add hidden fields to the forms. Hidden fields are
  already filled in, they aren't displayed to the user and they get passed
  along just as all the other fields.

  A similar example form with one visible field, one hidden field and one
  submit button could look like:

    <form method="POST" action="foobar.cgi">
      <input type=text name="birthyear">
      <input type=text name="person" value="daniel">
      <input type=submit name="press" value="OK">
    </form>

  To post this with curl, you won't have to think about if the fields are
  hidden or not. To curl they're all the same:

        curl -d "birthyear=1905&press=OK&person=daniel" [URL]

5. PUT

 The perhaps best way to upload data to a HTTP server is to use PUT. Then
 again, this of course requires that someone put a program or script on the
 server end that knows how to receive a HTTP PUT stream.

 Put a file to a HTTP server with curl:

        curl -t uploadfile www.uploadhttp.com/receive.cgi

6. AUTHENTICATION

 Authentication is the ability to tell the server your username and password
 so that it can verify that you're allowed to do the request you're doing. The
 basic authentication used in HTTP is *plain* *text* based, which means it
 sends username and password only slightly obfuscated, but still fully
 readable by anyone that sniffs on the network between you and the remote
 server.

 To tell curl to use a user and password for authentication:

        curl -u name:password www.secrets.com
 
 Sometimes your HTTP access is only available through the use of a HTTP
 proxy. This seems to be especially common at various companies. A HTTP proxy
 may require its own user and password to allow the client to get through to
 the internet. To specify those with curl, run something like:

        curl -U proxyuser:proxypassword curl.haxx.se

 If you use any one these user+password options but leave out the password
 part, curl will prompt for the password interactively.

 Do note that when a program is run, its parameters are possible to see when
 listing the running processes of the system. Thus, other users may be able to
 watch your passwords if you pass them as plain command line options.

7. REFERER

 A HTTP request has the ability to feature a 'referer' field, which can be
 used to tell which URL that causes the client to get this particular
 resource. Some programs/scripts check the referer field of requests to verify
 that this wasn't arriving from an external site or unknown page. While this
 is a stupid way to check something so easily forged, many scripts still do
 it. Using curl, you can put anything you want in the referer-field and thus
 more easily being able to fool the server into serving your request.

 Use curl to set the referer field with:

        curl -e http://curl.haxx.se daniel.haxx.se

8. USER AGENT

 Very similar to the referer field, all HTTP requests may set the User-Agent
 field. It names what user agent (client) that is being used. Many
 applications use this information to decide how to display pages. Silly web
 programmers try to make different pages for users of different browsers to
 make them look the best possible for their particular browsers. They usually
 also do different kinds of javascript, vbscript etc.

 At times, you will see that getting a page will curl will not return the very
 same page that you see when getting the page with your browser. Then you know
 it is time to set the User Agent field to fool the server into thinking
 you're one of those browsers.

 To make curl look like Internet Explorer on a Windows 2000 box:

        curl -A "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)" [URL]

 Or why not look like you're using Netscape 4.73 on a Linux (PIII) box:

        curl -A "Mozilla/4.73 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.15 i686)" [URL]

9. REDIRECTS

 When a resource is requested from a server, the reply from the server may
 include a hint about where the browser should go next to find this page, or a
 new page keeping newly generated output. The header that tells the browser
 to redirect is Location:.

 Curl does not follow Location: headers by default, but will simply display
 such pages in the same manner it display all HTTP replies. It does however
 feature an option that will make it attempt to follow the Location: pointers.

 To tell curl to follow a Location: 
 
        curl -L www.sitethatredirects.com

 If you use curl to POST to a site that immediately redirects you to another
 page, you can safely use -L and -d/-F together. Curl will only use POST in
 the first request, and then revert to GET in the following operations.

10. COOKIES

 The way the web browsers do "client side state control" is by using
 cookies. Cookies are just names with associated contents. The cookies are
 sent to the client by the server. The server tells the client for what path
 and host name it wants the cookie sent back, and it also sends an expiration
 date and a few more properties.

 When a client communicates with a server with a name and path as previously
 specified in a received cookie, the client sends back the cookies and their
 contents to the server, unless of course they are expired.

 Many applications and server use this method to connect a series of request
 into a single logical session. To be able to use curl in such occations, we
 must be able to record and send back cookies in the way that the web
 application expects them. The same way browsers deal with them.

 The simplest way to send a few cookies to the server when getting a page with
 curl is to add them on the command line like:

        curl -b "name=Daniel" www.cookiesite.com


 Cookies are sent as common HTTP headers. This is practical as it allows curl
 to record cookies simply by recording headers. Record cookies with curl by
 using the -D option like:

        curl -D headers_and_cookies www.cookiesite.com

 Curl has a full blown cookie parsing engine built-in that comes to use if you
 want to reconnect to a server and use cookies that were stored from a
 previous connection (or handicrafted manually to fool the server into
 believing you had a previous connection). To use previously stored cookies,
 you run curl like:

        curl -b stored_cookies_in_file www.cookiesite.com

11. HTTPS

 There are a few ways to do secure HTTP transfers. The by far most common
 protocol for doing this is what is generally known as HTTPS, HTTP over
 SSL. SSL encrypts all the data that is send and received over the network and
 thus makes it harder for attackers to spy on sensitive information.

 SSL (or TLS as the latest version of the standard is called) offers a
 truckload of advanced features to allow all those encryptions and key
 infrastructure mechanisms ecnrypted HTTP requires.

 Curl supports enscrypted fetches thanks to the freely available OpenSSL
 libraries. To get a pafe from a https server, simply run curl like:

        curl https://that.secure.server.com

 11.1 CERTIFICATES

  In the HTTPS world, you use certificates to validate that you are the one
  you you claim to be, as an addition to normal passwords. Curl supports
  client-side certificates. All certificates are locked with a PIN-code, why
  you need to enter the unlock-code before the certificate can be used by
  curl. The PIN-code can be specified on the command line or if not, entered
  interactively when curl queries for it. Use a certificate with curl on a
  https server like:

        curl -E mycert.pem https://that.secure.server.com

12. REFERENCES

 RFC 2616 is a must to read if you want in-depth understanding of the HTTP
 protocol.

 RFC 2396 explains the URL syntax

 RFC 2109 defines how cookies are supposed to work.

 http://www.openssl.org is the home of the OpenSSL project

 http://curl.haxx.se is the home of the cURL project