I surprised someone with my leet skills the other with this technique, so I thought I’d share it on the blog in case anyone else hadn’t seen it – I use it ALL the time :) Chrome has a feature which allows you to copy a web request as a curl request, so you see all the various elements of the request on the command line.

As an example, let’s consider a request to my site http://beta.lornajane.net. I turn on the developer tools in Chrome, make the request, and check the “Network” tab. There I see requests for the page itself and also each of the assets. Right-click on any of the entries there, and you’ll see the option to copy the request as curl:

When you paste the contents of your clipboard onto the command line, you’ll see something like this:


curl 'http://beta.lornajane.net/' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch' -H 'Host: www.lornajane.net' -H 'Accept-Language: en-GB,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/29.0.1535.3 Safari/537.36' --compressed


This shows all of the headers, switches and data that were sent when Chrome made this request, and now I’ve got it in this format I can of course edit any part of it that I please! I find it really useful when a particular request or endpoint is causing a problem just to be able to grab the single request and be able to replicate it on the command line very easily. I hope it helps you too – I’m sure the other browsers have equivalent tools so if you use an alternative way of doing the same thing, could you please add a comment and share it please? Thanks :)