Curl to return http status code along with the response

Question

I use curl to get http headers to find http status code and also return response. I get the http headers with the command

curl -I http://localhost
         


        

Answer 1

My way to achieve this:

To get both (header and body), I usually perform a curl -D- as in:

$ curl -D- http://localhost:1234/foo
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 20:59:21 GMT

{"data":["out.csv"]}

This will dump headers (-D) to stdout (-) (Look for --dump-header in man curl).

IMHO also very handy in this context:

I often use jq to get that json data (eg from some rest APIs) formatted. But as jq doesn't expect a HTTP header, the trick is to print headers to stderr using -D/dev/stderr. Note that this time we also use -sS (--silent, --show-errors) to suppress the progress meter (because we write to a pipe).

$ curl -sSD/dev/stderr http://localhost:1231/foo | jq .
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 21:08:22 GMT

{
  "data": [
    "out.csv"
  ]
}

I guess this also can be handy if you'd like to print headers (for quick inspection) to console but redirect body to a file (eg when its some kind of binary to not mess up your terminal):

$ curl -sSD/dev/stderr http://localhost:1231 > /dev/null
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 21:20:02 GMT

Be aware: This is NOT the same as curl -I ! As -I will perform a HEAD request and not a GET request (Look for --head in man curl. Yes: For most HTTP servers this will yield same result. But I know a lot of business applications which don't implement HEAD request at all ;-P