Simon Willison’s Weblog

trurl manipulates URLs. Brand new command-line tool from curl creator Daniel Stenberg: The tr stands for translate or transpose, and the tool provides various mechanisms for normalizing URLs, adding query strings, changing the path or hostname and other similar modifications. I’ve tried designing APis for this kind of thing in the past—Datasette includes some clumsily named functions such as path_with_removed_args()—and it’s a deceptively deep set of problems.
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curl-impersonate (via) “A special build of curl that can impersonate the four major browsers: Chrome, Edge, Safari & Firefox. curl-impersonate is able to perform TLS and HTTP handshakes that are identical to that of a real browser.”

I hadn’t realized that it’s become increasingly common for sites to use fingerprinting of TLS and HTTP handshakes to block crawlers. curl-impersonate attempts to impersonate browsers much more accurately, using tricks like compiling with Firefox’s nss TLS library and Chrome’s BoringSSL. # 10th August 2022, 3:34 pm

curlconverter.com (via) This is pretty magic: paste in a “curl” command (including the ones you get from browser devtools using copy-as-curl) and this will convert that into code for making the same HTTP request... using Python, JavaScript, PHP, R, Go, Rust, Elixir, Java, MATLAB, Ansible URI, Strest, Dart or JSON. # 10th March 2022, 8:12 pm

Hurl (via) Hurl is “a command line tool that runs HTTP requests defined in a simple plain text format”—written in Rust on top of curl, it lets you run HTTP requests and then execute assertions against the response, defined using JSONPath or XPath for HTML. It can even assert that responses were returned within a specified duration. # 22nd November 2021, 3:32 am

Making world-class docs takes effort (via) Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg writes about his principles for good documentation. I agree with all of these: he emphasizes keeping docs in the repo, avoiding the temptation to exclusively generate them from code, featuring examples and ensuring every API you provide has documentation. Daniel describes an approach similar to the documentation unit tests I’ve been using for my own projects: he has scripts which scan the curl documentation to ensure not only that everything is documented but that each documentation area contains the same sections in the same order. # 6th September 2021, 6:58 pm

ifconfig.co (via) I really like this: “curl ifconfig.co” gives you your IP address as plain text, “curl ifconfig.co/city” tells you your city according to MaxMind GeoLite2, “curl ifconfig.co/json” gives you all sorts of useful extra data. Suggested rate limit is one per minute, but the code is open source Go that you can run yourself. # 30th March 2021, 7:53 pm

aws—simple access to Amazon EC2 and S3. The best command line client I’ve found for EC2 and S3. “aws put --progress my-bucket-name/large-file.tar.gz large-file.tar.gz” is particularly useful for uploading large files to S3. Written in Perl (with no dependencies), shelling out to curl to do the heavy lifting. # 19th May 2009, 11:38 am

resty. 58 lines of bash provides a better command-line interface to RESTful APIs, using curl under the hood. This should save me from running “man curl” several times a week. # 18th May 2009, 1:07 pm