How to use curl to get a GET request exactly same as using Chrome?

Solution 1:

If you need to set the user header string in the curl request, you can use the -H option to set user agent like:

curl -H "user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.182 Safari/537.36" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28760694/how-to-use-curl-to-get-a-get-request-exactly-same-as-using-chrome

Updated user-agent form newest Chrome at 02-22-2021

Using a proxy tool like Charles Proxy really helps make short work of something like what you are asking. Here is what I do, using this SO page as an example (as of July 2015 using Charles version 3.10):

1. Get Charles Proxy running
2. Make web request using browser
3. Find desired request in Charles Proxy
4. Right click on request in Charles Proxy
5. Select 'Copy cURL Request'

You now have a cURL request you can run in a terminal that will mirror the request your browser made. Here is what my request to this page looked like (with the cookie header removed):

curl -H "Host: stackoverflow.com" -H "Cache-Control: max-age=0" -H "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8" -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.89 Safari/537.36" -H "HTTPS: 1" -H "DNT: 1" -H "Referer: https://www.google.com/" -H "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,en-GB;q=0.6,es;q=0.4" -H "If-Modified-Since: Thu, 23 Jul 2015 20:31:28 GMT" --compressed http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28760694/how-to-use-curl-to-get-a-get-request-exactly-same-as-using-chrome

Solution 2:

Open Chrome Developer Tools, go to Network tab, make your request (you may need to check "Preserve Log" if the page refreshes). Find the request on the left, right-click, "Copy as cURL".

Solution 3:

Check the HTTP headers that chrome is sending with the request (Using browser extension or proxy) then try sending the same headers with CURL - Possibly one at a time till you figure out which header(s) makes the request work.

curl -A [user-agent] -H [headers] "http://something.com/api"