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

Question

I have a web api http   something com api and I want to use GET to get the response body   This is my command   curl  http   something com api    Of course  it fails and gives an error message   When I use Chrome and input the above url  everythings correct  However I do the same things with Firefox  the url gives me the same error message  I try to repeat the action with Chrome extension DHC  the request gives correct response again  After some searching  I believe that the curl option --user-agent makes a difference  What is the correct way to set the user agent to Chrome  Or this is not the point  the problem comes from other fields  Thank you very much

User · Answer

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"

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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  quot 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 quot  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    Get Charles Proxy running Make web request using browser Find desired request in Charles Proxy Right click on request in Charles Proxy 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  quot Host  stackoverflow com quot  -H  quot Cache-Control  max-age 0 quot  -H  quot Accept  text html application xhtml xml application xml q 0 9 image webp     q 0 8 quot  -H  quot 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 quot  -H  quot HTTPS  1 quot  -H  quot DNT  1 quot  -H  quot Referer  https   www google com  quot  -H  quot Accept-Language  en-US en q 0 8 en-GB q 0 6 es q 0 4 quot  -H  quot If-Modified-Since  Thu  23 Jul 2015 20 31 28 GMT quot  --compressed http   stackoverflow com questions 28760694 how-to-use-curl-to-get-a-get-request-exactly-same-as-using-chrome

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

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