How to get cURL to output only HTTP response body (JSON) and no other headers etc

Solution 1:

You are specifying the -i option:

-i, --include

(HTTP) Include the HTTP-header in the output. The HTTP-header includes things like server-name, date of the document, HTTP-version and more...

Simply remove that option from your command line:

response=$(curl -sb -H "Accept: application/json" "http://host:8080/some/resource")

Solution 2:

I was executing a get request an also want to see just the response and nothing else, seems like magic is done with -silent,-s option.

From the curl man page:

-s, --silent Silent or quiet mode. Don't show progress meter or error messages. Makes Curl mute. It will still output the data you ask for, potentially even to the terminal/stdout unless you redirect it.

Below the examples:

curl -s "http://host:8080/some/resource"
curl -silent "http://host:8080/some/resource"

Using custom headers

curl -s -H "Accept: application/json" "http://host:8080/some/resource")

Using POST method with a header

curl -s -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" "http://host:8080/some/resource") -d '{ "myBean": {"property": "value"}}'

You can also customize the output for specific values with -w, below the options I use to get just response codes of the curl:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" "http://host:8080/some/resource"