Curly

A command-line tool for making curl requests simpler and more intuitive. Think of curly as a light wrapper around fetch in Node.js - plus some handy CLI niceties.

Features

• Simple JSON Posting: Automatically sets Content-Type: application/json if you're posting data.
• Automatic Content-Type Parsing: Tries to parse JSON responses by default. This makes it easier to make requests to JSON APIs or HTML documents without having to specify Content-Type headers.
• Helper Flags (like --help, --debug, --include) for easier debugging and data introspection.
• Familiar options: Mimics some curl style flags (-X, -H, -d, -I).
• Pretty Printing: The CLI automatically pretty prints the output for you, and groups response data into easily viewable chunks.
• Viewing history: Easily view history of commands you have written.

Installation

There are two main ways to install curly: globally via npm (for everyday usage) or by "linking" locally for development.

Global Installation

• Ensure you have Node >= 20 installed.
• Run npm install -g @cwl/curly
• Verify that curly is installed curly --help

Linking

If you're developing curly and want to test your changes without publishing:

• Clone or download this repository.
• Install dependencies npm install
• Build the CLI npm run build
• Create a symlink in your global npm bin folder: npm link
• Confirm the CLI is now accessible: which curly

Usage

Usage: curly [OPTIONS] <url>

Examples:

Simple GET request

curly https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1

• By default curly will use GET.

Quickly get a summary of your request, which includes the byte size of the response and the status code.

curly -S https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1

# OR 

curly --summary https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1

• Status codes are automatically colored red for you if they are > 300 and green otherwise.

HEAD request

curly -I https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1

# OR

curly --head https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1

Include only headers in output

curly -i https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1

POST raw JSON data

curly -X POST --data-raw '{"title": "foo", "body": "bar"}' https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts

POST key/value pairs as JSON (an easier alternative to --data-raw)

curly -X POST -d title=foo -d body=bar https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts

Write to an output file

curly -o ./test.txt https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts

Save cookies to a cookie jar file

curly -c ./cookies.json https://example.com/login

Send cookies with your request

curly -b "NAME1=VALUE1;" https://example.com/login

# OR pass cookies through regular headers

curly -H "Set-Cookie: NAME1=VALUE1;" https://example.com/login

# OR use a file (can be json or netscape)

curly -b ./cookie_file.json https://example.com/login

Send and save cookies with your request

curly -b "NAME1=VALUE1;" -c ./cookies.json https://example.com/login

Query params

curly https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts?userId=1

# OR 

curly -q userId=1 https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts

Viewing history

Usage: curly --history

• History is automatically written to ~/curly_history.txt

Debug mode:

curly --debug https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1

TODO

• Add full cookie support (right now we just support name, value pairs).
• Add testing.
• Make this an actual npm package so we can globally install / use it.