cURL – How to display request headers and response headers

The request headers contain the information about the resource that is required to be fetched. The response headers contain information about the response sent by the server. It’s something like server details and other information.

cURL is a command line utility used to transmit data over the different-2 protocols. It is a quick tool for developers to view the request header and response header values of a website.

1. cURL – Get Request Headers

Use --versbose or -v option with the curl command to fetch the request header and response header values as following:

curl --verbose google.com 

2. cURL – Get Response Headers

You can also use curl to fetch the response header values only. Use -I option to get the response header values.

curl -I google.com 

Output:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.google.com/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2022 09:25:56 GMT
Expires: Mon, 10 Oct 2022 09:25:56 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=2592000
Server: gws
Content-Length: 219
X-XSS-Protection: 0
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN

3. cURL – Get Custom Header Values

Sometimes you may need to fetch the specific header value. That is helpful for scripting and many other tasks. Use the grep command to filter specific values from complete header values. The -F is used to search fixed string and -i is used for case sensitive search.

curl -I google.com | grep -Fi "Content-Type" 

Output:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Wrap Up

cURL is a command line utility that is helpful for multiple tasks. We can also use curl to request a server for the details. This tutorial helped you to get the request header and response header values using the curl command line.