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 · Accepted 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 "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):

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 "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

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

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

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